Teleflora’s latest Valentine’s Day ads take aim at drop-shipped flowers and grocery store floral departments.
Three, 15-second Valentine’s Day commercials, which Teleflora florists can download and share online, end with the tagline, “Handmade with love by a local florist.” The videos contrast the experience of receiving a gift from a local florist to receiving flowers in a box or from a grocery store.
“Handmade With Love,” a multimillion dollar nationwide campaign that launches today, will use a variety of print and digital channels to reach consumers. At the heart of the campaign, three 15-second commercials that position a gift from a Teleflora florist as personalized and memorable, while portraying drop-ship and grocery store flowers as the less appealing option.
“Our research shows a lack of awareness coupled with a significant dissatisfaction when buying in a box,” said David Dancer, executive vice president and head of marketing at Teleflora. Meanwhile, an ad targeting would-be grocery store shoppers is “more about persuading folks to have a florist-hand deliver the gift.”
The ads themselves are compelling. “What’s more romantic?” a narrator asks in one of the commercials, as an image of a florist lovingly creating a floral design plays out on screen. “A hand-arranged, hand-delivered bouquet?” Here, the soft, soothing music that had been swirling in the background shifts abruptly to something more grating, as bunches of flowers are roughly dropped in a larger bucket. “Or the grocery grab-n-go?”
The two other videos take a similar approach, but this time train their sights on drop-shipped flowers: One contrasts a local florist carefully spraying blooms (“like your love, our hand-delivered bouquets are made to survive any storm”) to a brown box labeled “flowers” dropped on a doorstop in the middle of a deluge (“Theirs aren’t.”); the third video warns customers not to confuse “handmade” (a florist at work in a design room) with “D.I.Y.” (a harried woman in a cubicle unceremoniously receives a box of flowers, while phones ring in the background.)
The ads speak to research Teleflora has done on why and how consumers buy flowers — and what consumers see as some of the downfalls of key competitors to local florists, Dancer said. The value of local florists is something that he said the company wanted to emphasize through phrases such as “handmade” and “hand-delivered.”
This isn’t the first time Teleflora has turned to highly produced, memorable videos to send its message to consumer. Last year, Teleflora unveiled its “One Tough Mother” campaign for Mother’s Day, which included real moms (and real mom and florist Clara Gonzales of Tiger Lily Florist in Charleston, South Carolina). That campaign built on the success of the company’s “Generations of Love” and “What is Love?” campaigns for Mother’s Day 2015 and Valentine’s Day 2016.
