Watch our 2022-2023 Year Presentation

What we have achieved for the sector, and looking ahead to the coming years

Afbeelding

You can now watch our ‘2022-2023 Year Presentation' video. Created for our stakeholders, and free to view for all interested partners in the sector. After an unexpectedly chaotic 2020 and a turbulent start to 2021, we would like to look ahead with you at all the great campaigns and promotions to encourage consumers to buy more flowers and plants.

Watch the video
We would like to invite you to click on the video below and dedicate just over 20 minutes on an update from Dennis van der Lubbe, Managing Director Flower Council of Holland. 

A summary of the subjects covered in the video

A review of the most important activities in 2020-2021 
Consumers in our core countries of Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have been repeatedly targeted in recent months with campaigns for flowers, houseplants and outdoor plants. We have approached them through mass media, PR activities, content on our websites, through our social media channels, through influencers, with shopper activations, and e-mail newsletters.  

• At the start of the pandemic we gave the sector and consumers a boost with the ‘Let Hope Bloom’ campaign.
• The additional ‘Fill the distance with beauty’ campaign, developed in collaboration with many partners in the sector, was also a response to the crisis and has been received very enthusiastically.
• Not all activities could go ahead; we had to cancel the ‘We Need More Flowers’ campaign in June 2020, and we started 2021 without the planned ‘Plant Design’ campaign.
• Thankfully, a large number of other important activities did take place, like recurring seasonal campaigns like ‘Christmas blooms with flowers’, in which we ran a shopper activation in the Netherlands and Germany in collaboration with Fleurop. Jeroen de Zwart, CEO of Fleurop, tells us more about this. There was also a nice mix of Spring, Easter and Mother’s Day content for ‘Spring is Flowers’.
• The ‘We need more love’ Valentine’s campaign performed well. The target group gave the campaign a rating of 8, and 66% indicated that they wanted to buy flowers after seeing it.
• The new outdoor plant campaign ‘From Grey to Green’ encourages people to bring more greenery to their surroundings. In addition to coverage on social media, advertising and radio, we also appointed the first Green Mayor in Amsterdam. Linked to this campaign, there was a shopper activation for outdoor plants in Jumbo supermarkets throughout the Netherlands, resulting in excellent sales.
• The ‘We Need More Flowers’ campaign was rolled out again in the 2021. This time with a high impact 10 second video for television and social media in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, supported with PR content and a Dutch shopper activation.
• We introduced The Trend Collections in all core countries last year as an innovative alternative to the Flower Agenda and Houseplant of the Month. The results are very promising. For example, the influencer collaborations have been viewed a total of 3.7 million times.

Shopper Activations
As in past years, the number of collaborations on shopper activations with growers and traders are increasing. We expect to carry out no less than twenty shopper activations in multiple countries in 2021. Coen Jeuken, Assortment Manager for flowers and plants at Jumbo Supermarkets, talks about his experiences in this regard.

EU Campaigns
Last year we succeeded in winning a substantial EU subsidy, in collaboration with Union Fleurs and 6 other organisations within the floriculture sector in Europe, which enabled us to reach over 40 million consumers in 7 countries with the joint ‘Shine on’ campaign.
We have applied for another EU subsidy for the coming years, this time in collaboration with VLAM in Flanders and BdB in Germany. We are hoping to market our ‘From Grey to Green’ campaign widely to consumers abroad as well.

Looking Ahead
In the final months of 2021 we will be drawing consumers’ attention to houseplants with The Trend Collection, and obviously the successful ‘Thanks Plants’ campaign is also scheduled to go ahead. Cut flowers will continue to shine during the remainder of 2021 in the seasonal campaigns, and also within The Trend Collection from September. We will be starting a pilot for an entirely new campaign for cut flowers in October. Here too we are hoping for good results and sufficient budget to be able to keep this campaign on the calendar over the coming years.

Communication Calendar 2022-2023
The Communication Calendar for 2022 will again include the ‘Plant Design’ campaign. The ‘Thanks Plants’ campaign will also return for another year, and the new ‘From Grey to Green’ campaign will be repeated. The Communication Calendar for cut flowers for 2022 is largely identical to this year’s. The seasonal campaigns and The Trend Collection will tempt consumers with attractive content about flowers. We hope to supplement this with the follow-up to the new pilot campaign for flowers. In addition to repeating several familiar and successful campaigns, we expect to have entirely new campaigns for both cut flowers and houseplants in 2023.

Download the Communication Calendars
The carousel below shows the various elements from the 2021, 2022 and 2023 Communication Calendar. You can download the full Communication Calendars as a PDF file using the links below:

Thank you for your trust in us
All of the above was and is not possible without the collaboration with and trust of the floriculture sector. The Flower Council of Holland would therefore like to thank its stakeholders for this. The current system of levying the promotion contributions enables us to inspire consumers in the most important countries for our sector in a positive way, and to encourage them to buy flowers and plants. For this reason, we should not view this promotional contribution as an expense for today, but as an investment for the future.

​Any questions?
If you have any questions or comments, or if you’re interested to partner with the Flower Council of Holland, e.g. on a shopper activation - please e-mail us at info@flowercouncil.co.uk or contact Dennis van de Lubbe directly at dvanderlubbe@bloemenbureauholland.nl. Our door is always open. We hope to meet you in person as soon as it’s possible again, or otherwise virtually.

                                       
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