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Scenario
The houseplant industry is booming, with indoor gardening becoming one of the most popular hobbies in the United States. Sixty-six percent of households own at least one plant, and 33.1 million households actively participate in indoor houseplant gardening. Millennials account for the largest growth in the industry, with 70% calling themselves “plant parents.”
With the growing popularity of houseplants, more and more retailers, like grocery stores and discount stores, are reaping the benefits by starting to offer a larger variety than they previously have. This trend has negatively impacted small local nurseries, which don’t have the resources to advertise and market as heavily as chain stores.
Canyon Creek Nursery is a plant nursery in Illinois. A family-owned business, they’ve been successful for over 50 years through word-of-mouth and by advertising in the local newspaper during key times of the year. However, with the continued increase in competition from big box stores and online retailers, they’ve started to see their sales shrink.
Knowing the trend is likely to continue, Canyon Creek Nursery needs to communicate their benefits to customers. Although their houseplants are higher priced than the ones sold by big box stores, they offer a larger variety and more rare, sought-after plants. Their plants are top-quality, healthy, and locally grown, and everyone on staff is knowledgeable in horticulture and available on site to answer questions.
Because of the large increase in millennial “plant parents” of both sexes, Canyon Creek Nursery has designated them as their primary target audience.
To continue to stay in business, Canyon Creek Nursery must make their primary target audience understand they’re worth the higher price. They’ve hired your employer, Strategic Design Advertising & Marketing, to help them make this happen.
Your peers at Strategic Design have completed research of the target audience and the problem, which they’ve summarized and handed over to you. Your task as the graphic designer on the project is to take that information and move into the ideation stage – generating, developing, and communicating ideas on how to solve Canyon Creek Nursery’s problem.
The target audience, plant parent Millennials:
◦ Live in apartments or townhomes with little-to-no outdoor space, so they’re bringing nature indoors.
◦ Take pleasure in bringing their living spaces to life with plants.
◦ Spend a lot of time immersed in social media, often in regard to plants.
◦ Believe in the physical and emotional benefits of houseplants.
◦ Are gratified by the feeling of “being needed” by houseplants as they’re key to keeping them alive.
◦ Enjoy the sense of being part of a “plant community”.
◦ Plan to wait until later in life to have children so they’ve turned to plants in the meantime.
◦ Will compulsively purchase a houseplant that catches their eye.
◦ Most often purchase plants at home improvement stores, followed by garden centers, super discount stores, and supermarket florists. Online purchases have been growing as well.

Franks_Greenhouse-5460 by Ken_from_MD (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Instructions
Choose three ideation methods from the “Idea Generation” section in Module 04. Conduct the chosen methods/activities and sketch out 5 thumbnail ideas for each of them. (You’ll have a total of 15 thumbnails). Although thumbnails are quick idea sketches, they must be clearly understandable.
Determine which concept is the strongest from each of your three ideation sessions and turn each one into a comprehensive sketch. These should be professional sketches that you would submit to a client. Sketches needn’t be detailed, but they should be carefully thought out and cleanly designed. Quality is as important as creativity.
After you have finalized your three sketches, write a short memo to your creative director explaining what media you believe will be the most successful in reaching the target audience. At the bottom of the memo list the three ideation methods you used to create your concepts. See the resource below if you need a refresher on how to write a memo.
If you sketched digitally, save the sketches as a PDF. If you sketched on paper, either photograph or scan your images, clean them up (the paper should look white and the sketches clearly dark and contrasting with the paper) and submit as a PDF. It is highly recommended that you use a scanning app like Adobe Scan or CamScanner; low contrast images will affect your grade negatively.
Save your memo as a PDF and submit with your sketches.
Resources
◦ How to write a professional memo
◦ Houseplant statistics in 2022 (incl. Covid & Millennials)
◦ Millennials, house plants, and how market research can help companies target their ideal consumers.
◦ Consumer Houseplant Purchasing Report 2021
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