Studio & Entrepreneurship
This weeks lecture with Dan Perry, the digital strategist at Metier Digital spoke about identifying gaps, targets and audiences. Dan goes into great detail about the plan to find your audience and how to market your product and service. There are some useful tools that were suggested for analysing data to help information on the audience and learning how to engage with the customer. Marketing is important to any product and service, which using the right tools and platforms is vital to how we can push the market through meaningful stories and engaging with the audience through social media platforms. Social media is today’s tool in finding audiences by creating profiles that may appeal to 100’s or 1000’s of followers that give you channels to work on engaging with your consumer through stories and survey questions where data and content will become key in succeeding your product or service. Dan really talks about giving value to your audience, whether it’s to do with content or the product you provide. It’s about gaining trust and having empathy for the people that will be part of your brand that believe in your product. You can create community not by demographic but within groups made within Facebook where everyone can be miles apart but seconds away from creating a conversation and experiences. This strategic thinking can lead to developing unique customer experiences where you can create an emailing list in which you can give unique content which is specific to the customer and an opportunity in getting more people into the product.
Startups are a UK leading independent, online resource for anyone starting and growing a business. A very useful resource that has tones of information in helping to start the beginning of any business that outlines the basic plans to develop a startup.
A very simple but effective tool to plan your ideas to the strengths and weaknesses that you may want to address for future obstacles if you clearly identify the problems at this stage. It also makes everything more challenging because of the competitors out there, you can compare your idea to theirs where you can make your venture unique and understand your audience in more detail to have a successful service or product.
The Arts Council published a document on audience development and marketing which structures the simple process in defining and finding out about your audience. A section on ‘Why is audience development and marketing important?’ was an important section in how to understand your market target and what is important in developing audience reach in reaching existing and new audiences that will bring new opportunities and partnerships. There are a series of bullet points that can help you understand your target market by answering some questions around the subject so you pursue new avenues to reach out to your audience.
Workshop Challenge
For this week’s challenge, I chose to go with the idea of a subscription service that will help those who would like to grow their own vegetable and herbs in their own homes whether they have space that is too small or large enough to be an Olympic swimming pool. I wanted to go with this idea as it will be an opportunity in making changes in people’s lives through a number of factors from your wellbeing and making an impact on the ecological welfare of our environment.
My research has stemmed from looking into my competition and understanding a subscription service that will be the success of this product and service. This will be a challenge in looking at the entire model as a process in designing every part of the plan from administration to creative packaging so every sector gets treated fairly and stays on par throughout the process. There were two competitors that stood out for me that is ‘The Stem‘ and ‘Pot Gang‘, these are services that bring experiences, products, expertise and communities together to make people enjoy the fun of growing and taking care of plants and crops. The Stem focuses mainly on plants and gardening and they have a couple of vegetable and herbs start-up kits for people to enjoy. Pot Gang are mainly a vegetable and herbs subscription service which is very much like what I’m looking to do. Both businesses showed me the pros and cons of their services, which is great from a learning point. Pot Gang has this unique experience of a service that gives people the opportunity to experiment with the seeds to grow. They’re relentlessly encouraging with their content and happy to give advice on their products to help sustain a culture of growing crops in every household, but I find they don’t go that little beyond in being in touch with their audience. I feel this is where the gap is for my product where I can make more engaging content and build on pop-up stalls to connect with communities up and down the country to get people to be part of a project that will benefit the audience and environment. I believe there’s more to push in making people change their habits and have little patience in growing their own crops.
The Report
The Big Grow
Elevation Pitch
Home Grown is a product for people who are keen learners in growing their own sustainable veg and fruit plots in rural and urban areas. This will be a product and service for beginners who need the know-how, and for keen grow enthusiasts who wish to learn new tips and tricks in growing their own vegetables and fruit. This service will help organise a practical plan that will outline the seasonal crops throughout the year whether they are using their own balcony on a top-floor flat or an area in the customer’s garden with a raised bed with rich soil. The service will bring a service with rich advice on what the customer needs to fit in their surroundings and not lose the opportunity to be part of the big growing community.
Research
Learning to grow your own food can improve your physical and mental health as well as the benefits of looking after the environment. When growing your own vegetables and fruits your diet is more diverse and healthy, packed with vitamins and minerals that benefit our healthy living. Food in its rawest, freshest form is not only the tastiest way to enjoy, but also the most nutritional. There is the added advantage of staying active and saving money when producing your own food by enjoying the fresh air and keeping physically active every day while looking after your plot. This can lead to improving your cardiac health and immune system response, decrease heart rate and stress, and improve fine and gross motor skills, flexibility and body strength. Getting regular exercise can relieve stress, anxiety and depression, whilst boosting energy. This will save the pennies in your pocket to help budget your living wage in spending cheaply on a few seeds and making your own raised beds with the benefit of learning from experienced gardeners and farmers.
Audience
The audience is all people looking to listen, learn and make, which enables those to find a new hobby in making plots in their own home to grow variations of vegetables and fruits throughout the year that will benefit their health, environment and economic problems. People in the inner and urban areas can largely benefit from this product as this product will focus on innovating new ideas for those living in small and confined spaces. We want to encourage a growing community that can share and influence people to develop a skill that will benefit in educating the values of growing your own plot. This product will benefit all people in the demographic from young families and their kids to value the importance of growing and nurturing crops, as well as giving the tools for elderly people to prepare a new interest in growing their mental health and physical activities. This product will have rich content that may benefit everyone who has experience with growing a plot or not, but an opportunity for others to share their own methods with the wider community. We want to make a change through creating a big grow community that can pass on their skills to the future of a new generation of growers.
SWOT and Competition
There are some alternative gardening subscription services that deliver garden and indoor plants. I came across one veg and herb service ‘Pot Gang’ which has the service that I’m providing in my plan. In my research, there are some gaps that can be filled to enhance the experience of a subscription service with expert advice, planning tools, connecting with people in the community and initiatives that can challenge people to apply their creativity to design their gardens. Finding direct competition can help develop a healthy relationship between businesses in sharing ideas and working with communities to create something for the good of others.
| Strengths | Weaknesses | Opportunities | Threats |
| Ecological Impact | Crop Loss | Community Initiative | Preparing the Garden for Planting |
| Health Benefits | Time Input | Expert Advice | Soil Health |
| Variety of Produce | Financial Consideration | Educational | Cognizant of the water and tools needed |
| Understand your Soil | Availability | Control Over Pesticide Use | Use of Pesticides |
| Fresh Produce | Too Much Produce | Reduce Carbon Footprint | Harvesting your Spoils |
| Great Quality | Peoples Perception of the Produce | No Need for Plastic | |
| Experimental | Pesticides and Diseases | Improve MH and Wellbeing |
Marketing and Engagement
Our marketing will be based on research with our primary audience through social media advertising and creating groups where people can have discussions and understand their needs. Using Instagram and Facebook will drive our audience to connect with our product and share ideas with each other that we can add to our plans and services. This will bring opportunities to engage with an audience beyond our following through stories where we can create surveys and content that will appeal to people to be part of our Big Grow Project. We will want to build up an email list where we can focus on giving out rich content full of tips and tricks, event invitations and stories for our customers to share on their progress. It is key to show insights into communities growing their plots throughout the year with the incentive to encourage others. The insights from the customer will lead to help the benefits of our product with Google reviews which surveys on our service will play a part in delivering the best services to our communities. We want to partner with brands that will invest in our product to help grow the wider community which will be focused towards gardening stores, health and well-being organisations and local councils that can help our voices to be heard. We will participate in roadshows across the country, introducing the product with a pop-up shop/stall to introduce the Big Grow Project to engage with people face-to-face where we can make a human impact in showing how our product works, benefits the customer and how we want to influence the communities to take part.
Funding, Manufacturing and Distribution
We will be asking for business loans and grants from banks and local organisations that may help kick-start the business from packaging, seeds, and pots, and creating our website presence to launch our product and service. We will be dealing with logistic services to help send materials, seeds, soil and tools that will contribute to our subscription services. We will need a distribution centre where all our packaging items will be stored and sorted into the gifts that will be distributed across the country. This will have to be monitored on the demand of the subscription, if we need to upscale our distribution centre, as we will need to consider a small unit at the beginning of the business. We will be working closely with manufacturers that will help with being sustainable and eco-friendly for the products as we want every part of our packaging to be plastic-free and compostable products that go back into the earth to help grow the products and manage the best cost for the service. Our aim is to deliver the best cost-innovative solution that fits within the budget of a subscription.
Evaluation
The success of this venture will be judged on hitting the monthly targets of subscription and actively connecting with our audience through social media channels that create a positive impact through the product and service in sharing their plot development to their communities. We will measure the interaction of our surveys through social media stories where we can get feedback to help understand the needs of the customer and what has been a successful outcome. This will be overlooked as a team that will explore the growth of the company and keep the customer happy in building a good relationship with the audience. It is highly important to be on top of customer reviews throughout this journey, as the role of our product is to help people learn and grow with this product. We want to give them the best experience possible with the help of growing their plot with a co-creating platform in finding the benefits of growing your plot.