Working from home has given me the opportunity to spend time doing what I love – gardening. Any experienced gardener will confirm that rose bushes are difficult to maintain and finicky but when given the right care, will reward with beautiful and sweet-scented blooms.
As an amateur rose lover, I was always discouraged when I visited other gardens to purchase seedlings first because of the cost and secondly due to the conflicting advice and warnings regarding how difficult they would be to maintain. I therefore decided to try propagating them myself from my existing bushes after doing some research on the matter. The first time I tried it, 2 out of the 6 cuttings I wanted to grow survived. This did not only help me to learn from my mistakes but also made me more confident.
It was all good and cheerful until the leaves of my rose bushes started curling up. The flower buds would not open despite the periodic spraying with homemade organic pesticides and anti-fungal sprays. At a point half of my rose plants looked so bad that I had to consider the options of either uprooting the most affected plants and discarding them before they infected the others or treating the infestations. I chose the most difficult option of treating the infestation and after 2 months of consistent spraying, washing, and handpicking insects from the plants, all the hard work finally paid off. I was rewarded with the most colourful and fragrant blooms.
In the process I learned how to make my own neem oil which is a natural pesticide; found out that apart from their use as ingredients in the kitchen, cooking oil, baking soda and cinnamon were great assets to have in the garden and realized the benefit of aloe vera as a rooting agent when I run out of store bought rooting powder during the lock-down period.
As a marketer, I can relate my gardening experience to how easy it is for a brand’s reputation to be damaged in this highly connected digital era. This can be so severe that companies spend more money and resources to rectify the situation and re-brand. Some unlucky companies may end up losing market share or even losing the business totally.
Most brands that have recovered from major crisis did so by:
- Quickly recognizing such a situation when it happens, taking responsibility and proceeded to fix the issue
- Knowing who their stakeholders were and understanding their concerns
- Employing transparency in their dealings and communicated authentically with all stakeholders
- Reflecting on mishaps and applied the learning to future endeavors
It is inevitable that brands in some way will face negative attention on social media however, most of these situations can help strengthen a brand’s position in the market. This is because through the process of customers complaining or stating what is not working for them, the following are demonstrated:
- That the brand was being used by people
- Customers trust and care about what the brand has to say by bringing what is not working to the brand’s attention on a social platform
- To new customers the worst-case scenarios when dealing with the brand in question. When these mishaps are swiftly and effectively dealt, this can give prospects the impetus to move away from using worse performing competing brands. It also adds more incentive to existing customers to continue trusting the brand.
Therefore, it is important for brands to neither ignore such “infestations” from social media or “uproot” them with the intention of hiding them under the radar. Instead these misadventures can be managed to gain new customers as well as strengthen the trust that existing customers have in the brand.
I have now added garlic and marigolds to my garden because of their pest repelling abilities and started growing chrysanthemums and daisies. Looking forward to my next gardening experience with this new batch.
Until then, let us continue to wear our face masks, avoid touching our faces, observe social distancing protocols and wash our hands often.
