When the category changes faster than the customer

Categories teach us what to expect

Think about how somebody learns to garden.

Very few people formally study it.

They learn from parents and grandparents. From gardening programmes. From trial and error. From the person working at their local garden centre. From books, YouTube, Instagram or simply years of trial and error.

Over time, certain behaviours become automatic.

You look at the compost to judge whether it needs watering.

You use a particular type of product for seedlings.

You start feeding at roughly the same time.

You pick up a bag marked “multi-purpose” because that’s the compost you’ve used for most jobs before.

That knowledge doesn’t disappear simply because the composition of the product changes.

And from the customer’s perspective, why should it?

The bag still says compost.

It may still say multi-purpose.

It’s sitting in the same place in the garden centre and looks familiar.

The problem is that the product has changed much faster than the mental model surrounding it.

Peat-free isn’t one thing

Scott’s research brought another complication to the surface.

Peat-free growing media isn’t simply one new material replacing another.

Different products use different combinations of ingredients, and those combinations can produce very different characteristics.

Scott found substantial variation in the nutrient levels of the products he tested. He also discussed differences in water retention and the potential for the surface of some peat-free composts to appear dry while moisture remains further down.

So even the idea of learning how “peat-free compost” behaves may be too simplistic.

Which peat-free compost?

For what job? And at what stage of growth?

That starts to challenge some very established category language.

Take multi-purpose.

It’s a reassuring phrase. It suggests flexibility, simplicity and one product for lots of gardening jobs.

Commercially, you can see the appeal.

But it also creates an expectation.

If products with that description behave materially differently, or are better suited to some tasks than others, the customer experience will be inconsistent at best.

That’s a problem that begs the question: is the category organised and presented in a way that still reflects the products within it.

Sometimes the difference is obvious before anything grows

There is another complication when somebody tries peat-free for the first time.

They don’t have to wait several weeks to discover that something has changed.

Depending on the blend, peat-free compost can look, feel and sometimes smell different from the peat-based compost they’re familiar with.

There may be more visible fibres or pieces of bark. The texture can feel different in the hand. The colour and smell may not quite match the customer’s existing idea of what a bag of good compost should be like.

None of those things necessarily tells them anything useful about how well the product will perform.

But people make judgements anyway.

Open something familiar and find something unfamiliar inside and you’re immediately asking questions.

Is it supposed to look like this?

Is that normal?

Have I bought a poor-quality bag?

For an experienced gardener who has used peat-based compost for decades, that first reaction may be curiosity.

It could just as easily be suspicion.

And that means the product may already be starting its first trial with something to prove.

This is where perception and performance become difficult to separate.

If the plants subsequently thrive, those initial differences may quickly become irrelevant. But if something goes wrong, the unusual texture, smell or appearance suddenly becomes part of the explanation.

“I thought that compost looked strange when I opened it.”

Now add another complication.

Peat-free growing media are generally blends of several different materials rather than one dominant ingredient. Wood fibre, coir, composted bark and green compost can all bring useful characteristics, but they also have different physical and chemical properties.

Some of those raw materials can vary too.

Green compost, for example, can have different characteristics throughout the year if it isn’t carefully managed. Storage, moisture, weather and the way individual ingredients are processed can all affect the properties manufacturers have to control when creating a consistent final product.

That makes consistency particularly important.

A gardener who buys the same product twice quite reasonably expects the same experience twice.

If one bag feels different from another, retains water differently or produces a different result, they don’t see the complexities of sourcing raw materials, blending growing media and managing natural variation.

They see the brand name on the bag.

And inconsistency is especially damaging when the whole category is already asking people to change an established belief.

The first successful experience with peat-free helps create confidence.

The second needs to confirm it.

If the experience varies too much from one purchase to the next, the customer isn’t simply judging an individual batch. They may start questioning whether peat-free itself can be relied upon.

So there are really two expectations being managed at once.

The industry has to help gardeners understand that peat-free may genuinely be different.

But manufacturers also have to make sure that different doesn’t become unpredictable.

Because asking customers to learn a new category is difficult enough without changing the lesson every time they open another bag.

Reassurance can create its own problem

There is an understandable desire across the industry to reassure gardeners about peat-free.

Nobody benefits from presenting the transition as frighteningly technical.

If the message becomes “everything you’ve learned about compost is now wrong and you need to study this before planting anything”, we’re hardly encouraging more people to garden.

But there is a danger at the other extreme.

If we reassure people by suggesting nothing meaningful has changed, they carry their old assumptions straight into a different product experience.

And if the result disappoints, the conclusion may not be: Perhaps I need to alter how I water this growing medium.

It’s more likely to be: Peat-free compost doesn’t work.

There is nothing inherently alarming about telling somebody that something is different.

We do it successfully in other categories all the time.

The challenge is to make the difference understandable without making the product feel difficult.

Different doesn’t have to mean complicated.

But pretending there is no difference at all can leave the customer discovering it for themselves.

Usually when something has already gone wrong.

A first purchase isn’t the same as adoption

Marketing puts a lot of effort into generating trial.

Get somebody to notice the product.

Give them a reason to switch.

Remove the perceived risk.

Get the first purchase.

Job done, right?

Not really.

Particularly when the product asks the customer to change an established behaviour.

The first purchase only creates the opportunity for adoption.

What happens afterwards determines whether the customer buys again.

That feels especially important in gardening because the feedback loop can be slow.

If you buy a disappointing snack, you’ve lost a few pounds and perhaps ten minutes.

If you sow seeds, nurture plants, water them for weeks and they fail, the disappointment can be much greater.

You’ve potentially lost money, plants, time and part of a growing season. And depending on your level of experience, perhaps a little confidence too.

That makes success in that initial trial commercially significant.

A customer who tries peat-free and gets a good result has learned something new about the category.

A customer who tries it and fails may reinforce every suspicion they already had about it.

Scott put the potential consequence starkly:

“If people try peat free, fail, and peat is no longer available, they won’t just switch products. They’ll stop gardening.”

That might be the extreme outcome, but the underlying point is important.

A category in transition can’t measure success purely by how many people it persuades to try the new option.

It also needs to think about what those people experience next.

Failure changes the story people tell themselves

This is where the problem becomes particularly interesting from a brand perspective.

People aren’t impartial scientists.

We interpret new experiences through beliefs we already hold.

If someone believes peat-free is probably inferior and their first attempt goes badly, that experience has a ready-made explanation:

I knew peat-free wasn’t as good.

The actual cause might be more complicated.

They may have overwatered.

The growing medium may have been too nutrient-rich for the particular job.

They may simply have chosen the wrong product.

Or the product itself may genuinely have underperformed.

The customer won’t be meticulously analysing each step as Scott did in his trial.

They experience the outcome.

And that outcome helps shape what they believe next.

Once a negative belief becomes established, another claim saying “great results” or “premium quality” has much harder work to do.

That’s why the challenge isn’t merely consumer education.

It’s expectation management.

What should somebody reasonably expect from this product?

How is that different from what they already assume?

And what needs to happen for their first experience to confirm the promise rather than contradict it?

Category change needs more than product innovation

There is a tendency to think of innovation as something that happens to the product.

New formulations, different ingredients, better performance or a more sustainable material. But meaningful product change can alter more than the thing inside the pack.

It can make parts of the customer’s existing knowledge obsolete.

When that happens, you need to help the category establish new expectations. And that may take time.

It may require manufacturers and retailers to communicate more consistently.

It may mean challenging familiar language or accepted product hierarchies.

It may even reveal that some of the assumptions the industry has been making about how customers shop the category no longer hold.

That’s uncomfortable, because it is much easier to launch a changed product into an unchanged category structure.

But the shopper doesn’t experience your formulation strategy, sustainability roadmap or technical development programme.

They experience whether the thing they bought did what they thought it would do.

The gap is where the marketing opportunity sits

Scott’s research is specifically about growing media, but I think the principle is broader than that.

When change happens, there is often a period where the product has moved ahead of the customer’s understanding.

That gap is easy to dismiss as an education problem. But I think it’s more significant than that.

It’s a marketing problem, a product problem and potentially a category problem.

The brands that handle it well won’t simply tell customers that the new product works.

They’ll understand the expectations customers are bringing with them, identify where those expectations no longer match reality and make the new behaviour feel natural rather than burdensome.

Because trial alone isn’t enough.

Trial only becomes valuable when enough customers succeed to want to do it again.

And perhaps that’s the better test whenever a familiar category goes through significant change.

We need to move from persuading people to try the new version.

To asking: Have we made it easy enough for them to update what they already know, and succeed when they do?