Black Gold?
Black Gold?
For my Marketing Case Study I have chosen the brand Black Gold. For those of you who aren't the gardening type, this is a brand of soil. Black Gold is the most profitable brand of the company Sungro Horticulture. I would say that this brand's value proposition is: your ticket to a successful garden.
This brand has undergone a packaging change for their product lines. Along with the packaging change, the people at Black Gold have created a new site to go with their new professional look. This new Black Gold site can be viewed conveniently below, along with one side by side comparison of the new packaging change:
Packaging:
Old (left) vs New (right)
One marketing promotion, that unfortunately just ended, was their "Ultimate Summer Container Garden" Sweepstakes. The only information that was needed to enter was an email address and first and last name. In class we discussed how this is permission marketing. In other words, you are consenting to get spam emails for various promotions. Another interesting thing about the sweepstakes was the fact that the prize, valued at $250, was two container plants with a bundle of various Black Gold products. It was a pretty nice bundle of goods if you were willing to give away your email address.
The main reason this brand is so successful is because in almost all of their products they have the ingredient Sphagnum Peat Moss. This amazing ingredient really is soil gold when it comes to growing any kind of plant. There is a sociocultural stigma surrounding the harvesting of Canadian peat moss bogs however. The belief is that peat moss is a non-renewable resource that is being over-harvested and depleted. This, however, is not the truth. Sungro Horticulture really is a responsible company that doesn't green-wash (promote environmental values where none occur) their products. To read the truth from an actual ecologist, you can view an article from the link below:
To conclude, if I was the marketing manager of the Black Gold brand I wouldn't do a single thing differently. This brand is in every single gardening store and in every store with a gardening department (ex: Fred Meyer). It occupies the majority of the shelf space in all these places and has the results to prove it should occupy the shelves. This brand is so successful that its marketing department clearly knows what they are doing. However much they spent on changing and promoting their new packaging was money well spent in my opinion, and it seemed that my marketing class agreed. This proved to be a very beneficial case study that taught my class and I many new things.
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