Tropical Breeze - 2007

January is winter in most parts of the country, but for us in South Florida, it’s the best time of year. With our average daytime temperatures in the mid 70s and night temperatures in the mid 60s, our climate here resembles certain parts of coastal California in the summer, minus the high taxes.
We Floridians live in a kind of winter paradise for tropical plants. Temperatures can dip below freezing, but that doesn’t happen so often. Weather in January is usually dry and cool. It’s truly the perfect climate for a tropical plant show. Fortunately, we have the Tropical Plant Industry Exhibition (TPIE) in Fort Lauderdale January 18-20. It’s an event far enough from Valentine’s Day for non-Floridians to make a quick dash to Florida, look around the neighborhood at what’s really in the greenhouses, and get back home in time to shovel the snow out of their driveways.
The theme for the show this year is “fresh attitudes”—sort of reminds me of the years I was active in the produce association. While we don’t have to worry about making our booths match the theme, it’s certainly a good idea to start out the year with a fresh attitude. A whole new spring is just around the corner. We’ll either make a good profit or do just enough to cover our costs, depending on our attitude going into the major selling season. One option is to take the approach that we’re going to do the same thing as we’ve always done and see how it goes—if you’ve always been wildly successful with that strategy, then please continue.
Most people don’t have that success, yet they do the same old thing year after year. My friend and consultant, Randy Whitesides, says the definition of insane is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I guess there’s a lot of insanity out there.
It’s risky to say “today I will try something new or do something different.” If we repeat past efforts and they fail, we can’t really be blamed. Nothing changed, except the market. So maybe the answer is to try a bunch of different things at once and see which ones work. Good ideas are often proven wrong but far more are never even tried. Things that don’t work are easily discarded and successes repeated. The market is in constant change as consumers change their minds about what they want—we just have to try and figure out what that is.
Some things don’t change. People always want good value for money. People want to be successful with the products they buy. That means the plants shouldn’t die right away and the flowers should last a respectable amount of time.
Outside of the basics, consumers are used to getting a little more for their money from consumer goods every year, and every year our industry falls a bit further behind. We say consumers should love our products because they’re naturally beautiful and make people feel good. The working definition of should is “ought to,” but not necessarily “will.” IPods make people, especially young people, feel good AND they deliver much more value every year. Now, I’m not trying to say we need to beat iPods in the consumer market … we do, however, need to change with the market and figure out what’s going on.
Consumers want change but not too much. That’s one of the tricky parts of new product design. Retailers want new product all the time, with one caveat—it must sell well. The risk falls to the producers of consumer goods. It’d be much easier if we just competed with other floral goods producers. Yes, we do compete a bit with iPods (my kids would say it isn’t so because plants aren’t essential whereas iPods are). But still, most of our target market group makes a choice. Fortunately, there’s plenty of space for us in the consumer world. We have lots of opportunity for creativity and risk.
I hope to see you in Fort Lauderdale in January with a fresh attitude and an open mind to new product ideas.