In April, residents of select central Kentucky neighborhoods were surprised to find in their driveways Velcro wallets with what appeared to be large sums of money inside.
Each wallet was in fact a promotion from A Plus Lawn and Landscape in Lawrenceburg, Ky., including a business card for owner John Rennels, which appeared to be a Kentucky driver’s license. It also included the full-service company’s phone number and website. Several different cards for discounts and specials, some of which were written on fake $100 bills were also in the wallet. The discounts were for maintenance and design/build services. They ranged from a free consultation and design with contract for project construction and a free first mowing with a weekly mowing service contract.
Several months after launching the promotions, Rennels says the company of eight employees plans to do a similar campaign again.
“We’re still getting results from the promotion because we are doing year-long analysis,” Rennels says. “Feedback has been 95 percent positive; we’ve gotten some very good publicity and created some buzz.”
The company spent $11,000 on the campaign and choose to conduct it during April because that’s when landscape services are the most in demand, he says.
“We have a two-week window when it first starts to get warm. Since it didn’t get warm until May we’re going to run it another year. It was a very odd sales season this year,” he says.
Many advertising pieces are immediately discarded by the consumer and don’t produce high results, he says. Rennels came up with campaign by asking himself the question, “How could we take this driveway drop … and make it something that people are going to pick up?”
He was fairly sure people would pick up something that gave the appearance of money. He purchased 10,000 wallets from China and stuffed them with his promotional materials before distributing them to target neighborhoods.
While Rennels is still quantifying the results of the wallet campaign he predicts it will bode well for the company and plans to do another campaign next year with the same concept in the same areas. LM
Bealin is a Cleveland-based contributor for Landscape Management.
