The Floral Industry Is Dying and There’s No One to Blame but Themselves
By: Jeff Higgins
Tags: Social Media Marketing, Marketing, Flowers, Advertising, Social Media

On October 11th, florist in all 50 states got together to promote the floral industry as a whole along with their personal brick and mortar shops with Petal It Forward.

In 2015, Ogilvy PR and SAF (Society of American Florists) partnered together in promoting local florists as the go-to source for the flower purchasing needs while at the same time educating the consumer on the emotional benefits flowers have on a person’s everyday life and attitude in general.

They wanted to show that there’s still something very special about giving and receiving flowers from complete strangers. It’s an emotional connection that drives us not only to improve our own self esteem, but share that happiness with others.

This year during the group campaign, the hashtag #PetalItForward was used in over 1.5K posts by 1.1K unique accounts. The reach of these efforts found their way to 3.2 million people with 6.4 million total impressions.

A lot of this activity happened on Instagram because it’s more of a visual platform and the feed is easier to navigate while Twitter hung in there because it’s a fast paced, live feed environment.

While these are all good signs of a strong campaign, there’s still some numbers to look at that explain why the traditional flower industry is in a steady decline and has been for the past 5–10 years.

The Florist job outlook in the US

The number of floristry jobs as of 2010 was 66,500. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job outlook for floral designers is expected to decline by 9 percent annually from 2010 to 2020.

This decline is attributed specifically to a decreased demand for elaborate floral decorations with the shift towards buying loose cut fresh flowers from grocery and general merchandise stores.

The overall distribution of jobs is expected to decline by 29 percent in florist shops and increase 8 percent in grocery stores, which represents an employment decline of 6,200 jobs.

Here’s another interesting point to examine. There’s this belief floating around the floral industry that no matter what they’re up against as competition, they will always have better flowers and better customer service than the alternative.

Also, the marketing has always been toward an older demographic such as Baby Boomers while the data shows us that the most involved generation in the Petal It Forward campaign is Millennials.

Looking at every impression that came through Instagram during the campaign, at least 50% of them were in a demographic that very few shops are interested in.

Well let me rephrase that.

All flower shops are interested in reaching that younger demographic but very few actually do anything about it.

The shops that HAVE changed their marketing techniques, product offerings, and the way they reach/communicate with their customers are flourishing.

One of the biggest complaints is how the grocery store chains are hurting their profits but when they do nothing to counteract that in the community besides talk about it, the local flower shop just adds to the problem.

H-E-B a grocery store chain in Texas did a fantastic job of having employees go out into the community, and present teachers, law enforcement, and just random folks with flowers during the campaign.

They handed out upwards of 7,000 bouquets of flowers in one day which is a pretty large amount for a local flower shop to compete with but the point is, a local florist could have handed out 10 and still made an impact on the community.

If you’re not in the floral industry, here’s a little inside knowledge on how a few of the main players and brands work.

FTD and Teleflora take 27% off the top of any sale that gets wired in using their POS systems.

So if you call a local florist for a 100 dollar flower arrangement to be delivered out of state, that florist wires it over to another florist in the recipient’s area. At that point, the florist is only making 73 dollars and has to cut the amount of product used in the arrangement.

This could be the type of vase, greenery, but most of the time it’s the type of flowers used in the arrangement. That’s why one of the #1 complaints is: “This doesn’t look like the arrangement I ordered.”

1–800-Flowers and Proflowers on the other hand just ship the cheapest flowers they can buy in bulk over to you in a box held in with zip ties and no vase.

This makes ordering flowers from them less expensive than a brick and mortar florists because of all the corners and costs they cut but you end up with a sub-par alternative at best.

Nothing says how much you care like a box of wilted smashed weeds or the wrong flowers entirely.

This is where the floral industry is today.

Most of the shops are NOT better quality than what you can hand pick at a grocery store.

DIY is NOT a phase and people enjoy the activity of making their own arrangements and sharing that time with family and friends.

HALF of the money, at least 13% of what they’re losing in the percentage cut could be used in other forms of digital advertising like PPC or social media advertising.

The Society of American Florists is doing their best to keep everyone afloat while 90% of the florists depend on FTD and Teleflora to bring them business with no changes in personal marketing or advertising because “That’s just the way we’ve always done it”

You can count the flower shops that have changed how they approach their business AND customer interactions on two hands.

The floral industry can Petal it Forward all they want, but they’re going to ride head first into a wall if they don’t look where they’re going.

All campaign data from Zoomph.com

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