How the Pros Do It: Miracle-Gro Strategy Changes the Social Conversation

Looking toward its busy spring season, Scotts Miracle-Gro Company decided to make a strategic shift from its existing communication platform and activate a social conversation to drive a new brand position that appealed to new gardeners. Miracle-Gro’s platform had always been “we grow tomatoes twice as big,” but people who don’t garden don’t care about that explains Michalovich, who worked on the campaign.

There were many people talking about gardening on social, so Miracle-Gro set a strategy to use social as a catalyst to tap into those conversations and spur conversation – activating people to tell their own stories. The larger brand objective was to inspire new gardeners and shift the company’s brand image. Inspiring user generated content on social platforms became a strong way to achieve these goals.

Miracle-Gro began mining existing conversations about gardening and being outdoors. They introduced a hashtag and asked people to share their stories. This shifted the brand position from helping gardeners grow larger tomatoes to encouraging gardening as a way to make people feel happier and be healthier. “We created an ecosystem of storytelling, and social was a big catalyst for this,” says Michalovich.