Future OpportunitiesSavan Patel

Market Analyst InternGreat Grow Inc.

12/13/2014

Future Opportunities

If you ever lived in city, you are likely aware of the trouble that come with growing healthy plants and vegetables. Long ago, plants and vegetables grew healthy and bigger on their own; however, due to current environment, plants and vegetables are growing unhealthy and at really small scale. Success to grow even small plants is nightmares for current residents in some cities. The blame can fall on a lot of factors like pollution, not enough soil, and lack of sun light.

As we all know, important things that plants and vegetables need in order to grow bigger are sun, soil, air, and water. All of them are really crucial for healthy plants, but soil can be the most important factor. Soil provides the plant nutrients that plant requires to grow healthy. Bad soil means unhealthy plants and chances of growing healthy plants and vegetables are little to none. Soil also provides base for plants roots to hold on to, as they grow bigger. I think this is one reason plant and vegetables do not grow big or dies after growing up to some level since they are limited to how much access they have to soil. Cities’ lands are completely concrete and might have 4 by 4 space for plants and trees to grow on the sidewalks but that is not enough for plants to grow bigger. Less soil also relate to less nutrients for plants and less nutrients means unhealthy plants.

As future comes, these problems will increase at a significant level. Pollution is growing at a greater pace and that can damage the chances for plants to be grown in the city. Now, lets say that, if a natural soil like great grow’s soil amendment, can provide enough nutrients for the plants or vegetable to grow healthy, People will be happy to use great grow’s product rather than wasting significant amount of money in other products that will show no results.

After doing the research and personal experience, I believe that there is an opportunity for great grow to enter into home plant care market and home vegetable garden market. There is defiantly a growth in the industry and more people are adapting to growing plants and vegetables on their properties and great grow’s products are the only products in the market that is capable of growing healthy plants and vegetables. The Global Industry Analysts Report says, “The landscaping services market in the U.S. is expected to recover and poised and reach $80.06 billion by 2015.” In the article “Landscape Industry Statistics”, it states that the survey showed that in 2013, 67% of the landscaping participants were single family residential, 25% commercial/industrial, 7% multi-family, and 3% governmental/institutional. It also includes that 45% of the business was maintenance. So from this we can conclude that industry has potential to grow in the future and most growth will come from single family residential and for maintenance of the landscaping.

There is research done that shows that, in future, people are most likely to grow plants and vegetables on their own either inside the house or their backyards. People’s approach to growing their own vegetables will be based on methods that are being used to grow current vegetables and plants. Organic food is not affordable by middle class family and eating organic food everyday is unrealistic for them. So growing own vegetables is Best way to eat healthy while escaping the high market price. The best way to combat pollution is plants because they can observe carbon dioxide and exhaust oxygen into the air. The benefit of having plants in the person’s backyard or inside the house could be a lot. They will have access to fresher air and more oxygen resulting in less breath related illness.

People just don’t want them inside their house or backyard. People are attracting more and more towards plants and landscaping as the time pass. In the article “Grow Profits Through the Roof with Urban Garden F&B!” by Sherry Cummins, she states that the Waldorf Astoria in New York unveiled its new rooftop garden to attract more consumers and increase their profit, and reduce few operating expenses like utilities. This trend has started to happen and will

2

Future Opportunities

eventually grow bigger in the future so great grow have huge opportunity and should enter this market at this time period. The best example that shows that people are attracting more and more towards plants and landscaping is the High Line in New York City. That project has been so successful that city is considering transforming abandon rail tracks into structures like high line. It is not just businesses creating rooftop garden or rooftop vegetable garden; individuals have also started creating rooftop garden on their roofs. This change is caused by the benefits that people receive from transformation.

According to Lisa Kaplan Gordon, Landscaping doesn’t just make your property look better, it also boost your property value as well; however, too much landscaping can also bring down your property value. Decent amount of landscaping is always needed to get higher property prizes. Landscape economist John Harris stated in the article “Gorgeous Landscaping for Your House Means More Than Just Looks” that good landscaping boost your property value up to 28%. Not only it increases the property value, it decreases the property’s time on market by almost 10% to 15%. If the having nice landscaping can increase the home value, home Vegetable garden will most likely to increase the house value as well.

There will be different approach to each of these markets. Even though, consumers are the same, approach should be different for both of these markets. In-home plant care market is huge industry and growing at rapid pace. If you walk to any new office buildings or residential buildings in big cities, you will be able to see a lot of plants found on premises. Now, in order to take care of it, building management will not hire a designated person to take care of that task. Management usually outsources these activities to landscaping company who visit the premises every few days to take care of the plants and landscaping.

As personal experience, living in housing complex, complex management have hired a landscaping company that comes every two weeks to care for all the plants and grass inside the complex. They are responsible for growing, cutting and maintaining.

One of my recommendations to enter this market is to do business with big landscaping companies that will use our products when providing their service. There is no point of approaching direct individuals who will use our products. In order to directly target individuals, marketing cost will be huge compare to cost of marketing to landscaping companies. As a cost beneficiary, doing business with landscaping companies will be the best effective and efficient way to enter into home plant care market. We can’t forget that this companies doesn’t cater their services to individual houses, they also sometime cater to other type of market too. For example, office buildings, residential buildings, hotels, venues, and etc… once we have contract with few landscaping companies, we will be catering lot of different markets that required plant care with frictional of cost that will needed to target each market individually.

The approach that I think will be most effective for home vegetable garden will be little different. We can use similar strategy as home plant care market, but we will need to do business will local farm where we provide them with our products that they use to harvest vegetables. This cost can be included in our marketing cost because we will have exposure to people whoever see those vegetables that are grown with Great Grow’s products. This won’t be the most effective strategy but if you compare cost with amount of exposure that you get from marketing strategy, it will be less compare to other strategy.

If the budget for marketing is not an issue, we could do mass marketing with Television advertising that will demonstrate use of our product and its results. Of course the cost will be more; however, this would be the best approach to target household individuals that are interested in planting vegetable garden in their backyards or individuals that already has

3

Future Opportunities

vegetable garden. TV commercial cost can vary depending on what you want to do. According to Nancy Wagner, 15 seconds commercial will cost less than 30 seconds; but 15 seconds commercial are widely used for branding purpose and 30 seconds commercial are used for convincing the audience. 30 seconds commercials for national network usually costs anywhere from $100,000 to $350,000 depending on the network and time. TV commercial will create more revenue due to large audience exposure; however, it is the risk that we will need to take because there is no guarantee that TV commercial will bring more revenue.

At last, I strongly believe that entering in-home plant care market will be good decision because of the growth that it is been showing; however, I cannot be sure about entering into Vegetable garden market. The strategies that I recommended are by keeping the company’s financial and market in the mind. These strategies will cost less to Great Grow while reaching out to more consumers that will help Great Grow increase company’s value.

4

Future Opportunities

Reference

Cummins, S. (2013, June 11). Grow Profits Through the Roof with Urban Garden F&B. Retrieved October 2, 2014, from http://hospitality.cvent.com/blog/marketing-resorts-on-the-internet-2/grow-profits-through-the-roof-with-urban-garden-fandb

Gordon, L. Gorgeous Landscaping for Your House Means More Than Just Looks. Retrieved September 29, 2014, from http://www.houselogic.com/home-advice/landscaping-gardening/landscaping-home-value/#.

Planet. Retrieved November 20, 2014, from https://www.landcarenetwork.org/PLANET/Media/Statistics/PLANET/Media-Press/Landscaspe-Industry-Statistics.aspx?hkey=153835e3-12da-4656-85a6-430be2358ec1

Science of Life Exploration. What do plants need for growth? Retrieved September 25, 2014, from http://www.nysipm.cornell.edu/teaching_ipm/sole/green_sci/plants_need.pdf

Wagner, N. How Much Does Television Advertising Really Cost? Retrieved December 2, 2014, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/much-television-advertising-really-cost-58718.html

5