Every Hour Has a Buyer
Perhaps at the garden centre too?
We know how the number of collection cycles in the fashion industry has exploded. The author Elizabeth Cline described these as ‘micro-seasons’. From the early 2000s onwards, the fashion world no longer had just the four collections aligned with the seasons, but 15 or more micro-seasons.
This concept of micro-seasons has also been enthusiastically embraced by garden centres. The four traditional seasons have been expanded to include numerous event themes, ensuring that the centres remain attractive destinations for customers throughout the year.
What if we took this idea a step further and developed the garden centre as a place where, throughout the day, different atmospheres could be designed for different target groups?
Global luxury strategist Tara Nolan recently explored this in an interesting comparison between pricing models for television advertising and atmospheric design in hospitality: “Every Hour Has a Buyer: How Traditional Media Principles are Growing Hospitality Brands & Revenue”
“Now the best operators are treating a single space as four different businesses depending on the hour, and pricing, programming, and branding each block on purpose. Hotels have quietly done a version of this for decades through revenue management, charging different rates for the same square footage based on demand and season. Part of what’s new is that the practice has moved off the rate sheet and into the space itself – it’s no longer just the price that shifts by hour, it’s the entire identity of the place.”
Could these reflections also apply to a garden centre day out?
What do you think?
