SEASON 4 , EPISODE 10
Karen Wilkinson on the 5 Growth Drivers in Garden Care, why Education Matters, and Building Brands that Win
It’s no secret, gardening can be complicated.
Different plants require different conditions and care. Soil varies. Weather changes. Products do different jobs. Even experienced gardeners regularly need advice because no two gardens, seasons or projects are the same.
But complicated doesn’t have to mean confusing.
When Karen Wilkinson, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at Evergreen Garden Care, joined us on The Underground, she shared the company’s five-year vision for growing the garden care category.
Evergreen had identified an opportunity worth more than £152 million over five years by attracting more people into gardening and helping existing gardeners do more, buy more and understand when it is worth spending more.
The five growth drivers Karen described look quite different on the surface.
They range from attracting people at key life stages to inspiring new projects, encouraging more lawn care, helping customers trade up and responding to the growth in small-space gardening.
But there’s a common thread running through almost all of them:
Make gardening easier. To start, to understand and to succeed.
That feels significant for anyone marketing products in the garden sector.
Complexity may be unavoidable. Confusion isn’t.
One of Karen’s observations particularly stood out to me.
No matter how experienced somebody is, gardeners continue to look for help and reassurance.
They’re dealing with different plants, soils, weather conditions and unfamiliar jobs. There’s nearly always something new to learn.
So, because we could equally be talking to an experienced gardener or a novice, the answer isn’t to dumb gardening down. It’s to manage that complexity for the customer.
And that’s important when you start thinking about packaging, point of sale, websites, social content, retailer training and the wider way garden products are presented.
A customer shouldn’t need to understand everything about plant nutrition, growing media or lawn care before they can confidently choose the right product.
The expertise should already exist behind the product.
The communication needs to make that expertise useful.
Make it easier to start
Evergreen calls its first growth driver Your Journey Begins.
The thinking is based around the life moments when somebody might begin paying more attention to their outside space.
Moving house is an obvious one. So is having children, getting a pet, empty nesting, retiring or simply reaching a stage in life when you have more time to spend at home.
According to Evergreen’s analysis, increasing the number of UK gardeners by just 1–2% could add more than £40 million to the category over five years.
But there is an interesting marketing challenge hidden inside that figure.
Someone who has just acquired their first garden probably isn’t starting from the same place as an enthusiastic gardener who has been doing it for 30 years.
They may not know which jobs need doing. Or which products they need. Or understand much of the jargon. And they may be more afraid of looking stupid or getting it wrong than established gardeners realise.
If our answer is to present them with an entire category’s worth of choice, technical information and established gardening language, we risk making the first step feel harder than it needs to be.
The opportunity is to recognise where somebody is in their gardening journey and give them a sensible next step.
Not all the information they could possibly know. But just enough to give them the confidence to begin.
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Make gardening fit the way people live now
Evergreen’s Urban Oasis driver comes at the same problem from another direction.
Gardens and lifestyles have changed.
More people rent. Gardens are often smaller. Some people have a balcony rather than a lawn. Others might have plants indoors, a few pots by the door or enough room to grow chillies but nowhere sensible to put a greenhouse.
Karen made an interesting point in our conversation: responding to that change isn’t simply a question of developing more houseplant products.
You have to think about the customer’s circumstances.
Can they transport a large bag of compost without a car?
Could they carry it up several flights of stairs?
Are pack sizes appropriate for the space they have?
What sort of project feels achievable?
What information would help them succeed?
Evergreen estimated this opportunity at around £15 million over five years, making it the smallest of its five growth drivers financially.
But Karen described these people as the gardeners of the future.
Someone who successfully grows chillies on a balcony today may be the person buying lawn care, compost, plant food and gardening equipment when they have a larger garden later.
That first experience can shape what happens next.
Make it easier to know what to do next
Growth isn’t only about finding people who have never gardened before.
There is also considerable value in helping existing gardeners take the next step.
Evergreen estimates that inspiring gardeners to try one new project could be worth more than £30 million to the category over five years.
For example, someone who has enjoyed growing plants in beds and borders might try growing vegetables. A successful veg trug might lead to a vegetable bed. That could eventually lead to growing from seed or buying a greenhouse.
The same principle applies to lawn care.
Karen explained that encouraging a customer to go beyond one spring treatment and return for another lawn product during the season could be worth nearly £20 million over five years.
Again, information becomes part of the commercial opportunity.
We’re not asking: What else can we sell this customer?
The better question is: What might this customer want to do next, and how can we make that feel achievable?
That gives us an opportunity to communicate differently. Instead of starting with the product you want to promote, you start with the job the customer might want to do.
Then packaging, POS, content and retailer communication can help create the bridge between the two.
Make it easier to choose with confidence
Perhaps the most obvious place where complexity gets in the way is at the point of choice.
Walk into many product categories and you’ll find several products apparently doing similar things at noticeably different prices.
Garden care is no exception.
Karen talked about the difficulty customers can have understanding the familiar good, better, best journey. These are familiar questions:
Why is this lawn product more expensive than that one?
Why should I buy this compost?
What extra performance am I getting?
Is that difference relevant to what I’m trying to achieve?
The trouble is that brands often know the answers to those questions internally.
The technical team, product managers and retailer buyers may know. But the shopper standing in front of the shelf doesn’t have the answers.
And a collection of claims isn’t the same as a reason to choose.
If every pack is promising great results, better performance and some variation of an impressive technical benefit, the customer still has to work out what those differences actually mean for them.
Product hierarchy needs to be clear enough that somebody can understand not only what costs more, but why it is worth more.
That is a messaging problem. A packaging problem. And increasingly, a digital shelf problem too.
Proof becomes especially important when confidence has been knocked
Our conversation with Karen also covered Evergreen’s move to peat-free growing media.
At the time of the interview, Evergreen had invested more than £4 million in its operations over the preceding 12 months and had undertaken large-scale trials with garden centres around the country.
Karen’s point was that you can’t simply ask people to trust you.
The product has to perform in gardens, garden centres, hanging baskets and community projects, in real conditions rather than just controlled trials.
That same principle led into Miracle-Gro putting its product guarantee much more prominently into its communication, backed by horticulturally trained advisers who could help customers if they weren’t happy with the result.
And here I can see a much broader branding lesson. If shoppers are hesitant, adding or tweaking a claim on the front of pack may not be enough.
Sometimes you need to reduce the perceived risk of making the choice.
Trials, demonstrations, guarantees, reviews, credible evidence and knowledgeable support can all give shoppers a reason to believe and trust what you’re telling them.
Particularly if you have a premium product and are asking them to pay more.
Making things easier doesn’t mean making them bland
I think there’s a potential trap here.
In the pursuit of clarity, brands can strip communication down to remove complexity, but at the same time they’ve stripped away all the personality as well.
Karen made another observation towards the end of our conversation that I think is just as important.
Gardening is emotional.
People don’t spend time creating gardens purely to complete a series of horticultural tasks.
Gardens can make people proud. They bring pleasure. They provide somewhere to relax, entertain, experiment, escape, grow food, spend time with family or simply enjoy being outside.
Yet, as Karen pointed out, a lot of garden marketing remains very functional and technical.
That gives brands two jobs to do.
Make the choice easier. And make the outcome desirable.
The first helps somebody understand which product to buy.
The second gives them a reason to care about buying it.
Good garden marketing needs both.
There’s a lot of commercial value in removing friction
Evergreen’s five growth drivers are the company’s view of where growth can come from, rather than a universal template every garden business should copy.
But the thinking behind them is widely applicable.
Look at where people hesitate.
Look at where they become confused.
Look at where knowledge you take for granted isn’t reaching the customer.
Look at the moments when someone might be ready to start, progress or try something different.
And look at whether your communication is helping them move forward or unintentionally making the category feel harder to enter.
Karen summed it up neatly when we talked about the principles she brings to brand marketing:
“We’ve got to make it easy for consumers.”
That doesn’t mean removing the expertise, science or horticultural knowledge that makes good products good.
It means translating it into something people can understand, believe and act on.
If Evergreen’s figures prove broadly accurate, there is a significant commercial reward for garden brand marketing if we get better at doing it.
Sometimes category growth doesn’t start with inventing something entirely new.
It starts by making it easier for more people to enjoy what is already there.
This article was inspired by our conversation with Karen Wilkinson, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at Evergreen Garden Care, on The Underground Podcast. Listen to the full episode to hear Karen discuss Evergreen’s five growth drivers, consumer education, peat-free performance and brand marketing.