CalFlowers’ marketing campaign, “Flowers. Self Care Made Easy,” boasted favorable results with consumers. A foundation established by the organization is seeking voluntary funds for future campaigns.
Encouraged by favorable results from CalFlowers’ marketing campaign, “Flowers. Self Care Made Easy,” which promoted the benefits of flowers, a foundation has been established to collect voluntary funds from the floral industry for future campaigns also aimed to get Americans enjoying more flowers more often.
The campaign, which is part of the brand “That Flower Feeling,” launched in late January. It paused briefly for Valentine’s Day, then resumed until the second week of April. It featured a video of a woman’s flawed but humorous attempts to find her Zen, such as accidentally removing her eyebrows with a heavy-duty face mask and practicing “scream therapy.” In the end, she decides flowers provide a simple and satisfying pick me up. The ad appeared on social media, including sponsored posts produced by influencers on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest, as well as on podcasts and the musical streaming site Spotify.
“The campaign outperformed general marketing benchmarks in virtually every category, from engagement rates to ad likeability, and most importantly ‘intent to purchase,’ on virtually every platform,” says Steve Dionne, executive director of CalFlowers (the California Association of Flower Growers and Shippers), whose members voted to create a message that would increase flower consumption around the country, benefitting all segments of the floral industry.
The That Flower Feeling Foundation, an independent non profit established in April, contracted Lucid, a powerhouse in marketing analytics, to assess the campaign. Overall, it made 60 million impressions. Moreover, people engaged with the ad, “liking” it, commenting on it and sharing it with their networks — at a rate that far exceeded expectations. For instance, there was an 18 percent engagement rate on lifestyle TikToker Jayria’s (@herdresscode) posts; generally, marketers consider a 1 to 4.9 percent rate successful for that site.
Best of all, Lucid’s online surveys of 2,000 people exposed to the ad found that 74 percent loved it, 70 percent changed their opinion of flowers and 70 percent intended to buy themselves flowers. Extrapolating those results to the 60 million total viewers could translate to a significant number of regular flower purchases.
“This isn’t even the full picture of the campaign’s reach and effectiveness,” says Dionne. “It’s only a snapshot of what we could measure.”
Additionally, CalFlowers provided assets (print and digital materials) that industry professionals could download and use in their own marketing. (At press time, 247 companies did so.) The foundation also hired a marketing company, 180 New York, to produce daily posts. “None of these efforts are included in our data,” Dionne says.
Advertising experts say successful campaigns work for two to three years before they get stale. “We have a great one out there right now and we’d like to ride the wave as long as we can,” Dionne says. Still, the foundation is eyeing the future, and would like to begin working on a second campaign in eight to 12 months. “‘Self Care Made Easy’ took nine months to develop, so it’s fair to expect that we have at least six months of work ahead of us,” Dionne says.
The group’s initial goal is to raise $2.5 million a year to continue producing campaigns. CalFlowers has pledged $500,000 for the next three years. “We believe that we can make up the rest with small contributions from a huge swath of the industry — retail flower shops, wholesalers, growers, importers, breeders, transportation companies,” Dionne says. “Donations are completely voluntary, but our ask is 1/100 of revenue. With this, the floral industry will finally, once and for all, have a continuing general consumer advertising program that we already know works.”
Katie Vincent is a contributing editor for the Society of American Florists.
