Joost Bongarets, CEO of Florabundance and a member of CalFlowers’ board of directors; Jeanne Boes, general manager and COO of the San Francisco Flower Mart and CalFlowers’ president-elect and a board of director; and Steve Dionne, AAF, executive director of CalFlowers, accepted the Marketer of the Year award. They were joined by Anne Stewart, vice president of Smithers Oasis North America; Amanda Jedlinsky, Floral Management editor in chief; and Dwight Larimer, AAF, PFCI, founder of Design Master, now a division of Smithers Oasis.
A national marketing campaign that promoted flowers as self-care and gifted the marketing assets to the industry to use at a local level is the winner of the Society of American Florists’ 2023 Marketer of the Year award.
CalFlowers’ (the California Association of Flower Growers & Shippers) “Flowers. Self care made easy” campaign won over a panel of six judges, clinching the industry’s top marketing award and a $5,000 prize sponsored by Design Master, a division of Smithers Oasis.
“This is not a CalFlowers win. This is a win for everyone in the flower industry,” said Steve Dionne, AAF, executive director of CalFlowers. “We hope that this increased visibility encourages more industry stakeholders to participate in and contribute to the That Flower Feeling brand.”
The cornerstone of the campaign is a video that features a woman’s hilarious attempts at self-care. In the end, she discovers the simplicity and mental health benefits of buying flowers. That video and other marketing assets — which are available for floral businesses to use for free — appeared on social media and streaming services. CalFlowers estimates that by the end of the year the campaign will have reached 120 million people.
The panel of judges included five floral marketers and one outside marketing expert.
One judge, Jessica Kegerreis, senior marketing and creative manager at Syndicate Sales, described the campaign as “a groundbreaking campaign for our industry” because of its “creativity, mass adoption, and viral reach.”
Another judge praised the campaign for how it leveraged the opportunity for exposure in response to the Miley Cyrus’ song, “Flowers,” in which she croons, “I can buy myself flowers.” The That Flower Feeling Foundation, established in 2022 to collect funds for future campaigns, sent Cyrus a custom-made vase replicating her hand and rented billboards and billboard trucks around Los Angeles thanking Cyrus for unofficially promoting the campaign’s message in her song.
“The originality of this campaign is undoubtedly a winning factor,” said judge Sahid Nahim of Above All Flowers and New Blooms Solutions, a floral marketing agency. He added that the spin-off campaign targeting Cyrus “showcases remarkable creativity.”
Read more about the campaign in the September/October issue of Floral Management.
Amanda Jedlinsky is the managing editor of SAF NOW.
