Gardening Advice

As you become more familiar with what I call Coproduction Experience Design, you'll come to recognize that the critical element of a well-designed coproduction experience are vision, access, incentive, and expertise. In this post, I'll share an case I found that elaborates the concept of expertise.

When companies build the expertise of customers, one of the expected outcomes is that customers will be more likely to spend money on add-ons, enhancements, and consumables. After all, once a customer has invested time to learn a new hobby, he or she wants to continue leveraging that expertise.

Many companies are training their employees to build the expertise of customers. In an article called Digging for Gardening Advice (WSJ, 6/7/05, D5), Ron Lieber discusses his search do-it-yourself gardening advice. He cites that Home Depot has certified over 7,000 "nursery consultants" to help shift customers from novice gardeners to expert green thumbs.

In reading this article, I had some thoughts about how gardening retailers could better share their advice -- and be more prepared. Mr. Lieber did several interesting things before consulting several gardening retailers. He took pictures of the area he wanted to plant, and he wanted a plan (map) of how best to fill the space with flowers. How did he know to do this? Were the "nursery consultants" prepared for such a customer? Perhaps these are experiential elements that gardening retailers could incorporate into their service scripts.

The take away from this is that if a customer like Mr. Lieber is successful setting up his do-it-yourself terrace garden, he'll become a regular income stream as he maintains and improves his garden.
(Copyright 2005, Honebein Associates, Inc.)