The B.C. Greenhouse Growers’ Association kicked off a $200,000 marketing campaign on March 20 with an event held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in downtown Vancouver.
The event, which featured a farmers’ market, a pop-up greenhouse with ripe fruit, as well as veggies served by Earls Restaurants, was designed to raise the awareness of consumers shopping for local food who tend to overlook greenhouse produce.
Steffen Janzen, marketing strategist for Relevention Marketing Solutions, the Abbotsford, B.C.-based company that created the campaign, said the launch event on the first day of spring also kicked off a print, radio and online campaign. The campaign features a series of YouTube videos that aims to reach 250,000 British Columbians by the end of March.
Part of the online campaign is a Facebook contest hosted by partner Buy Local/Eat Natural that asks consumers to send in pictures of people enjoying local produce.
“Buy Local/Eat Natural has 17,000 fans, so we are tapping into a target audience that is hyper-interested in the whole local movement,” said Janzen. “The insight for the campaign is that we want consumers to be anticipating the arrival of the first crops of local veggies on the first day of spring.”
Linda Delli Santi, executive director for the B.C. Greenhouse Growers’ Association, said part of the problem is that people don’t understand what’s grown in the greenhouses, how it’s grown, and they figure the product looks too perfect.
“People say ‘Your products are so beautiful. What are you doing to them? They are not natural,’” said Delli Santi. “But they are natural.”
The tagline for the campaign is “B.C. veggies arrive with the spring,” she added. “We want to alert people to all the positive attributes of greenhouse production. We grow sustainably, we use integrated pest management and we are environmentally friendly.”
The campaign was partially funded with a $100,000 grant from Investment Agriculture Foundation of B.C. through the provincial government’s “Buy Local” program.
