by Kelly D. Norris

Value-Added: Cliché or Nuanced-Marketing

Sit down and count how many times you’ve heard the catch phrase “value-added” in the last week. One, two, three… I can easily think of, but it must have been a slow week.  Farm magazines, gardening blogs, horticultural hotlines, it’s all over the place. Seriously, I’m beginning to wonder what it really means. Is it something that marketers and branders toss around aimlessly rather than use with any practicality? Does it have winsome potential?

You might wonder why I’m complaining about “value-added” in the first place. It’s a good thing right? Surely so and it offers a lot of opportunities for agriculture. It’s also been around for longer than I’ve made a career of writing. The principle is simple enough: products are marketed with strategies that generate a perception of greater value than what the product possesses innately. It’s a basket of vegetables at the market complete with skillet, olive oil, and cooking utensils. It’s a fresh-cut bouquet complete with vase and water. Pardon the silliness, but this is sometimes the notion of value-added products that we are endowed with as consumers. Specialty crops, like horticultural goods, and the folks who produce them are under constant pressure to value-add.

Container gardening is probably hot on the heels of the value-added movement because it allows producers to package products into something bigger, pricier (at least than the individual items), and something that sells well as a unit. It’s great too. I’ve picked up some amazing ideas and even cashed in for a few I couldn’t live without (and that I lacked the courage to do myself).

But I’m worried it could quickly become cliché if we throw it around as a branded novelty. Ask yourself, is it really something you pay attention to. That is do you assess the individual components of the container garden with a $39.99 price tag or do you perceive the container as satisfactorily priced at $39.99? Most economists would agree that the drive of free enterprise is the creation of value, so is it really that novel when products are branded as value-added when they should be created with an appropriate amount of value in the first place? It’s all a game of perception. And the fact is that for horticulture, we need the public to perceive our products with higher value. But I don’t think its additive for our consumers. I’d venture that most consumers would weigh the value of the aforementioned container with other containers because that’s the unit they perceive. You might ask yourself if you can get the same container for $29.99 at another place or you might jump with elation to find such a good deal at $39.99.

Where does it stop? Maybe it was always about the container in the first place. When it comes down to it, value-added products need to have readily perceivable and interpretable value which means that it needs to be immediately recognizable to consumers why this product, or form of product, is better than an earlier form. Its consumers recognizing that tofu is of more value than a bushel of raw soybeans. Its consumers recognizing that a bunch of annuals together in one container are worth more because they are in one container together. If that perception isn’t there, then nothing has been added because the only value interpreted is what the container possesses innately. It’s all a precarious game and a fine line to walk as a business owner. Marketing should be spun just enough to pique the interest of consumers and engage them while not overwhelming them with mediocrity and less than expected results; the brush-by effect where consumers ignore the intended message. If value-added is just thrown around carelessly, let’s face it we’re not adding value at all.

Kelly D. Norris is Farm Manager at Rainbow Iris Farm and, when not in the garden, can be found roaming the greenhouses of Horticulture Hall at Iowa State University.· Check out his blog, the E-Garden Almanac, at his website http://www.kellydnorris.com/ for images of the plants mentioned.