Real Men Get Flowers, Too

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Flowers have traditionally been regarded as something sent along with a social note or a condolence card but those days are apparently over.

"It took us a long time," explains Jerry Robertson, associate professor of horticultural marketing at Ohio State University and a leading industry analyst, "but we finally realized that what we're really in is a fashion industry. Giving fresh flowers is becoming as common as taking a bottle of wine along to a dinner party.

The effort to change domestic consumer attitudes toward retail floral products is being conducted on several fronts. The American Florist Marketing Council, a voluntary promotional wing of the Center for Commercial Floriculture (formerly, Society of American Florists), is spending about one-third of its $3 million budget on a multimedia ad campaign pitched around the slogan, "A Flower is Worth a Thousand Words."

"We're very anxious to persuade consumers that flowers and plants aren't only for special days," says the center's Rex Boynton, "and we try to be a catalyst for local retailers to do the same thing."

In addition to investing another $20 million of their own in local ad campaigns, retailers have been trying to come up with imaginative ways of moving their blooms off the vine and into customers' vases. One such pioneer is Al Felly, who designed the oft-copied Friday Bunch, an unpretentious floral arrangement that looks nice, costs little, and helps clear his shelves of perishable inventory over the weekend. Jose Falconi is another. Falconi's Southflower Market Ltd. in New York City, now expanded to Atlanta and Dallas represents perhaps the hottest new trend in floral retailing: mix-and-match, pick-your-own, single-stem displays that allow customers to make their own arrangements on the spot, much as they would browse a vegetable stand for the right salad ingredients.

Getting shoppers to think of flowers as less serious, more spontaneous consumer items has been made a little easier by the sharp rise in producer value of both potted flowering plants (up from $107 million in 1970 to $358 million in 1981) and potted foliage plants (up from $38 million in 1970 to $541 million in 1981). The passion for potted plants that won't wither and die within days has given the whole industry a boost. And then there are foreign forces, giving domestic producers plenty of competition. Biggest of the exporters is Colombia (carnations, daisies, roses, mums), which shipped more than 750 million stems to the United States last year; most aggressive, however, is the Netherlands.

"In Holland, they sell flowers everywhere, even at gas stations," says Lilli Ann Bresnahan, of the Flower Council of Holland, North America branch, an organization that is spending large -- but undisclosed -- amounts of money to promote U.S. flower purchases. "Fifteen years ago, though, the market was about what it is in the U.S. today. The difference is exposure to the product. That, plus cheaper price."

But Bresnahan notes that there are also cultural differences separating the tastes of Europeans and Americans.

"More Dutch men buy flowers," she says, "but more men over there also get flowers . . . When a Dutch soccer team wins a big match, all the men are given tons of flowers; Super Bowl winners in America aren't."

While the United States waits to see if the Washington Redskins tiptoe through the tulips on their way to another NFL title, U.S. florists are more concerned with such basics as getting their product to the public and then educating the public on what to do with it. In their May 1982 report, the Society of American Florists noted: "A major consumer problem is that we have not taught the consumers what they can expect from floral products. With proper care, how long should a potted chrysanthemum last? How long should fresh roses last? The American public is not interested in failures; they want'success."

That's easy. Success will be when ex-jocks do flower commercials as often and as effectively as they now shill for beer.