Tesselaar Among First Plant Innovators Pursuing Mobile Marketing With New GardenPilot®
Web and mobile tool helps gardeners find and buy plants virtually anywhere
Download the news release in Microsoft Word format: Tesselaar News Release - Tesselaar Among Plant Innovators With New Gardenpilot (04-22-2010); Image: GardenPilot with Flower Carpet Rose Information (JPEG format); Image: Flower Carpet Rose Image on iPhone (JPEG format).
APRIL 14, 2010 – Almost every gardener has seen a plant in a nursery or someone’s garden and wondered – “What is that plant? Could I grow that in my garden? Where can I get it?”
Tesselaar Plants is helping to provide immediate answers to these perennial questions and more by listing its collection of plants with a powerful new online and mobile garden research tool called the GardenPilot.
The announcement marks a bold move by Tesselaar Plants to engage in the fastest growing area of marketing – reaching consumers via their mobile phone. According to Gartner Group, a leading technology analyst firm, mobile browsing is a widely available technology present on more than 60 percent of mobile phones shipped in 2009, a percentage Gartner expects to rise to approximately 80 percent in 2013.
“We’ve entered the age of mobile marketing because the always-on nature of mobile devices provides more timely communications than any other marketing channel,” said Anthony Tesselaar, company cofounder and president. “GardenPilot enables consumers to access vital information about our plants in seconds using their phone.”
GardenPilot is perfect for garden experts or those new to gardening because it features more than 13,000 beautifully illustrated plant information pages, along with helpful tips and advice from renowned gardening experts and plant breeders. Users can search for plants by category, branded collection or by relevant characteristics. For example, you can search for the award-winning Flower Carpet® roses or Carpet roses by navigating to “Roses” and scrolling through the A-Z list. You can also navigate to “Roses” and filter by branded collections, which will provide Flower Carpet roses as a choice.
“Never before has the consumer had such a powerful online and mobile garden resource at their fingertips,” said Steve Cissel, CEO of 10-20 Media, the Maryland-based company that created GardenPilot. “We are pleased to have Tesselaar family of branded plants included in the application.”
While the tool is available as an iPhone application, any phone that has access to the mobile internet can access GardenPilot on their phone by visiting http://m.gardenpilot.com.
This move into mobile marketing is just another important step in Tesselaar’s strategic, integrated marketing campaign, which over the past year has included a new, social-media savvy communications partner (Brand | Cool Marketing, of the Finger Lakes region of New York), a redesigned, polished, interactive newsroom and a company-sponsored blog full of great gardening articles, tips and trends by master gardener/garden writer Lisa Hutchurson.
For Hutchurson’s review of GardenPilot – plus timely articles and videos on topics like planting and pruning roses, spring décor ideas from your yard and garden and the top 10 garden trends for 2010 – just visit Your Easy Garden at www.youreasygarden.com. (You can also get there through the Tesselaar Web site, at www.tesselaar.com or by visiting the newsroom (http://newsroom.tesselaar.com).
About Tesselaar
Headquartered in Australia, Tesselaar Plants introduces new plants for the home garden, landscape, home décor and gift markets. Tesselaar Plants undertakes extensive research and development of its varieties and, once selected for introduction, provides marketing and promotional support for its plant brands and to its grower and retail network. Tesselaar’s portfolio of plants is small by design, given rigorous standards that result in high-quality, dramatic, prolific plants that are also environmentally friendly and exceptionally easy to grow. The company’s licensed growers ensure the plants are readily available for landscapers, horticulturists and home gardeners. Tesselaar plants can be found in both big-box mass merchandise retail outlets as well as independent garden centers. (www.tesselaar.com)
