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Overview
This marketing communications plan seeks to promote and position the Community Gardens project as a preferable food enterprise in Bournemouth and Poole region (B&PSFCP n.d.).
The aim is to engage Bournemouth and Poole’s residents on food poverty and support community gardens to promote the cultivation and use of local food (Francis 2003). The project will provide rental community gardens and information via different media to enable locals to farm horticultural crops for their own consumption.
Summary of Situational Analysis
Aim
The central aim of this marketing communications plan is to promote B&PSFCP’s community garden program as an affordable way of growing fresh and healthy products for community use.
Objectives
The objectives of this communications plan include:
- To create brand awareness among the low-income residents of Bournemouth and Poole through B&PSFCP’s website in order to gain 50 new clients within the first six weeks.
- To expand the market share by 15% through media campaigns that inform people about upcoming events and activities as well as the role of the program in reducing food poverty.
- To create social networking opportunities that will bring together 100 low-income clients from the target communities.
- To run a five-week advertising campaign to educate the communities about the importance of community gardens in producing healthy and fresh local food at affordable costs.
Target Segment
The community garden program will target low-income families, i.e., households whose annual income is below the median income of £22,250, in Bournemouth and Poole area. This will include communities living in apartments or flats and thus, depend on packaged food because they lack land to grow their own food (Allen 1999).
The communication campaigns will target Asian immigrants, including Chinese and Indians, who constitute 3.9 percent of the Bournemouth and Poole population (Andrews & Henson 2004). This demographic segment is characterised by:
- Downtown residents who work in various food enterprises in the greater Bournemouth and Poole region
- Immigrant community groups experiencing food poverty
- Youth gardeners (aged between 19 and 30 years) from the immigrant communities
- Most of the families live in apartment complexes and have no access to arable land
- Urban residents in the lower income groups, i.e., individuals whose annual income is below £22,250
- They are socially conscious clients
- Foodies who love locally grown food
Marketing Communication Strategy
Defining a marketing communication approach is essential in reaching the target market and achieving project goals (Anantachart 2005). In line with the objectives, a unified digital strategy will be adopted to create awareness and encourage the target segment to be involved in the community garden program.
The key messages, disseminated through digital media, will aim to persuade residents to acquire rental community gardens at affordable rates that will enable them to grow their own food (Emerson 2002).
This will promote the B&PSFCP community garden as a destination for individuals who like fresh, healthy, and local produce and as an enterprise that supports diversity and inclusivity and allows clients to share knowledge and skills (Anderson 2008). The marketing messages will be designed in a way that develops a sense of community among the target residents. In developing the digital messages, focus will be placed on:
- B&PSFCP’s marketing campaigns to alleviate food poverty in the UK
- Information to stakeholders about community gardens featuring success stories, news briefs, and benefits of consuming locally grown food
- B&PSFCP’s role as leader in food security initiatives in Bournemouth and Poole region
- Horticultural techniques
- Videos and pictures showing horticultural activities on community gardens
- Information about B&PSFCP’s unique mission and goals
Besides informing users about the community gardens, the digital content will be organised in an interactive way to trigger engagement with B&PSFCP’s clients. According to Holm (2006), interactivity in online platforms strengthens the user’s connection to the business.
The digital strategy will involve introducing community gardens in B&PSFCP’s website as one of its core projects, launching a newsletter, and starting a new blog (Lasica 2003). Clients will be able to learn about the project’s events through email newsletters or by visiting the organisation’s blog and website. These efforts aim to encourage visitors to acquire rental community gardens to cultivate diverse horticultural crops.
Promotional events will be launched alongside B&PSFCP’s marketing campaigns that take place annually (Sustainable Food Cities n.d.). The aim is to create a sense of common ownership around the rental gardens and differentiate them from similar offerings in the area. This will give the organisation a strategic advantage in the market.
Besides digital media, marketing activities will also involve traditional communication channels, e.g., Radio. Efforts will be made to create awareness and engage the target audience in the grassroots to motivate them to rent community gardens (Lawson 2005). Involving communications that target specific ethnic communities, such as Indians, will be more effective than media advertising.
Although B&PSFCP’s attracts relatively high attention from the press, it will be important to have a media relations strategy. Attention from the media presents a good opportunity to inform the public about the community gardens project. This will involve working with key figures in traditional and new media to pass the messages to the public.
To keep stakeholders informed about the activities of the community market, B&PSFCP’s will develop internal communication channels, such as quarterly newsletters and email messages. This will promote transparency and trust in the in the program’s activities.
Marketing Communication Tools
A variety of communication tools will be used to market B&PSFCP’s rental gardens projects. The key communication tools will include B&PSFCP’s website, an email newsletter, and a blog.
Website
The goal of this communications plan is to enable B&PSFCP to reach a wider audience in its target market (Bournemouth and Poole’s Asian community). A website is an important communication tool for sharing information to wider dispersed audiences (Gronroos 2004). To attract traffic, B&PSFCP’s adverts placed on traditional media will carry the organisation’s web address.
In addition, all correspondence originating from B&PSFCP will feature its website address. The revamped website will contain information about community gardens, rental rates, garden designs, location, size, and resources offered (Anderson 2008). It will be updated on a regular basis to provide current information only.
User-friendly features, such as an interactive user interface, will allow visitors to navigate the website easily. The B&PSFCP’s website will be redesigned to provide links to the community gardens webpage. The web page will highlight a calendar of events and resources offered by B&PSFCP. It will contain graphics and videos as well as a client comments section.
The website will also be optimised for small screens to allow target clients to access information via their mobile devices. This will also increase the number of users visiting the website and help achieve all the objectives of the plan.
Blog
A new blog will be launched alongside the website to improve how the organisation engages online visitors. This will enhance the “depth of communication” and allow visitors to interact amongst themselves (Wright 2006, p. 42). It will also enable visitors to post their comments, which is essential in promoting B&PSFCP’s online presence.
In line with objective one and three, a blog will serve the role of archiving information on topics of interest to the immigrant communities, including the types of local food crops that can flourish in the community gardens. The information and topics posted on the blogs will have a web link to the website. Besides informing visitors about community gardens, the blog will also provide daily updates to B&PSFCP’s partners.
Email Newsletter
Another important marketing communications tool for the digital strategy will be newsletters. According to Nelson (2008), newsletters maintain “top-of-mind awareness” by providing up-to-date news to the target audience (p. 17).
A regular newsletter, named ‘B&PSFCP Community Garden’, will inform readers about up-coming events and success stories from clients farming in the community gardens. It will be in an electronic format to ensure a broader coverage of the target market. The organisation will also produce print version that is similar in terms of appearance and information to the electronic newsletter.
A database of the contact address of the recipients will be maintained to facilitate regular correspondence with them. Interested clients will receive newsletters on a bi-weekly basis. The email newsletter will contain the organisation’s web address and blog information to encourage recipients to visit these sites for further information. This type of newsletter will help achieve the second objective of this project.
Mainstream Media
Information dissemination through media releases is not only comparatively cheap, but it also reaches a wider audience. One approach that will be used to ensure media releases produce the intended effect is creating a storyline about the B&PSFCP Community Garden for the media to disseminate.
This will ensure that the organisation retains greater control over the information transmitted by radio or television. In this way, only accurate messages that reflect B&PSFCP Community Garden’s viewpoints will find their way into the media.
A good relationship with key media houses, such as ITV Meridian and Heart Dorset & New Forest radio will ensure that the organisation’s storyline becomes featured in media releases.
Topics of interest to clients such as evaluation reports of the program, new horticultural products offered, how the program has reduced food poverty, and client stories about community gardens, will be disseminated via mainstream media. In line with objective one and two, positive media coverage will ensure accurate representation of the perspectives and objectives of the community gardens project.
Regular media releases and interviews will increase brand awareness. Besides radio and television, the organisation will place regular adverts in mainstream newspapers, such as the Daily Echo and the Poole Observer, in Bournemouth and Poole to reach the target clientele.
Mainstream media will also be used to cover special events and important announcements. This will increase the organisation’s presence in print media, radio, and television, which will be essential in creating public awareness about the project.
Social Media
Social media tools are fast and reliable platforms of communication with clients. B&PSFCP will post information on its Twitter and Facebook pages on a daily basis. The organisation will disseminate in-house videos covering events via YouTube.
According to Mangold and Faulds (2009), social media are efficient and inexpensive marketing tools that an organisation can use to expand its market share. In this project, social media will be used to advertise special events and interact with clients.
Schedule
Proposed Budget for Marketing Communications
Evaluation Techniques
An evaluation strategy is necessary to appraise the effectiveness of the promotional activities implemented. According to Ambler (2000), an evaluation should assess the quantitative and qualitative component of the program activities that contribute to the success of the community garden.
The qualitative techniques for evaluating B&PSFCP Community Garden plan will include regular reviews of program reports, in-depth interviews, observation, and client surveys (Watson 2012). An evaluation committee will review quarterly reports, advertising materials, and media articles about each garden to determine the progress of the project.
Another evaluation approach will be participant observation. The evaluator will observe the activities taking place in each community garden on a weekly basis. Photographs and field notes will help assess the success of the program. Factors such as “political events, stakeholder meetings, and conferences” have an impact on a program (Pickton & Broderick 2001, p. 61).
In this view, the evaluators will attend these events to determine program constraints and limiting factors. Interviews involving the youth gardeners, their parents, and program stakeholders will also help in the evaluation of the program.
A random sample of 20 participants will participate in face-to-face or telephone interviews. Respondents will be asked to describe how the program has been beneficial to them, its weakness and strengths, and their experiences since they started farming in the gardens.
The evaluation will also involve a quantitative component. Since the evaluation will occur during the gardening season, it will not be possible to use an experimental design to evaluate the program. In this regard, a retrospective or post-test technique will be used. As Ewing (2009) puts it, post-test models are weaker compared to quasi-experimental designs in evaluating the success of marketing communications.
However, since there is only one treatment group (youth gardeners) a post-test comparison based on retrospective data can be used to evaluate the program. The comparison groups will be drawn from clients cultivating different gardens. They will also comprise of participants cultivating different food crops.
The assessment will involve a questionnaire instrument to measure the respondents’ views about the activities of the program. The same questionnaire will be administered to the two comparison groups. Reinold and Tropp (2012) suggest that comparison subjects be individuals receiving a similar treatment or intervention.
The intervention in this case is the community garden program being evaluated. The intervention alters the views and behaviours of the clients over a given period. Therefore, several comparison groups will be selected from different gardens to evaluate the success of the program.
The evaluation will seek to determine why the clients took part in community gardening. The marketing strategy aims to attract gardeners from diverse ethnic backgrounds and characteristics.
Thus, a comparison of different demographic groups will indicate what aspects of the communication strategy encouraged them to engage in community gardening. Thus, post-test surveys will yield useful quantitative data for evaluating the success of the program.
Conclusion
The residents of Bournemouth and Poole region are mostly urban dwellers who have limited access to arable land. A B&PSFCP community gardening project targeting low-income immigrants in this region communication tools, such as social media, company website, and local media, among others, to create awareness, educate the communities, and expand B&PSFCP’s market share.
References
Allen, P 1999, ‘Reweaving the food security safety net: Mediating entitlement and entrepreneurship’, Agriculture and Human Values, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 117-129.
Ambler, T 2000, ‘Marketing Metrics’, Business Strategy Review, vol. 11, n. 2, pp. 59-66.
Anantachart, S 2005, ‘Integrated Marketing Communications and Market Planning’, Journal of Promotion Management, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 101-125.
Anderson, M 2008, Making Healthy Food More Accessible for Low-Income People: Farm and Food Policy Project. Web.
Andrews, I & Henson, A 2004, Images of England – Bournemouth, Tempus Publishing Ltd, Stroud, Glos.
Bournemouth and Poole Sustainable Food City Partnership [B&PSFCP] n.d., Themes and Delivery Pledges. Web.
Emerson, B 2002, From Neglected Parcels to Community Gardens: A Handbook, Wasatch Community Gardens, Salt Lake City.
Ewing, M 2009, ‘Integrated marketing communications measurement and evaluation’, Journal of Marketing Communications, vol. 15, no. 23, pp. 103-117.
Francis, M 2003, Urban Open Space, Island Press, Washington.
Gronroos, C 2004, ‘The Relationship Marketing Process: Communication, Interaction, Dialogue, and Value’, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 99–113.
Holm, O 2006, ‘Integrated marketing communication: from tactics to strategy’, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 23-33.
Lasica, J 2003, Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other, Nieman Reports, New York.
Lawson, L 2005, City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America, University of California Press Berkeley.
Mangold, W & Faulds, D 2009, ‘Social Media: The New Hybrid Element of the Promotion Mix’, Business Horizons, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 357-365.
Nelson, R 2008, Marketing: Communication Tools, Blackwell Publishing, New York.
Pickton, D & Broderick, A 2001, Integrated Marketing Communications, Pearson Education, New Jersey.
Reinold, T & Tropp, J 2012, ‘Integrated marketing communications: How can we measure its effectiveness?’ Journal of Marketing Communications, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 113-132.
Sustainable Food Cities n.d., Bournemouth & Poole Sustainable Food Partnership. Web.
Watson, T 2012, ‘The evolution of public relations measurement and evaluation’, Public Relations Review, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 390-398.
Wright, J 2006, Blog Marketing, McGraw-Hill, New York.
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