Case Study

TruGreen-ChemLawn, USA

The Green Book

Situation Analysis

TruGreen ChemLawn is the nation's largest lawn and landscape service provider, with more than 3.4 million residential and commercial customers served through independent branches across the country. Each branch is responsible for its own sales and marketing efforts, and is tasked with supplementing national advertising efforts with local marketing initiatives. However, while corporate provided each location with various collateral pieces, including door hangers, direct mailers, and ad slicks, branch management was given little assistance or guidance in general marketing principals or specific tactics.

Objective

Develop a public and community relations program that can be successfully implemented by individual branch managers who have limited experience, resources and budgets.

Strategy

As a first step, DiMeo surveyed more than 500 branches across the United States in order to determine what tactics and activities were already being implemented and to what degree of success. Branch managers were also asked to evaluate the success of each program as well as estimate the number of hours and costs required to execute each activity.

Solution

Once the results of the survey were analyzed, the agency was able to determine not only the best-of-breed tactics already being utilized at the local level, but also identify areas of missed opportunity and create a plan to maximize each branch's budgets, talents and efforts. Realizing that this information needed to be presented in-an extremely user-friendly format that would be understood by even the most novice marketer, DiMeo created The Green Book.

The Green Book is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide designed to help each branch create a local community relations program. The manual is filled with simple, tried-and-true methods of building awareness, establishing a brand identity, creating goodwill and ultimately driving sales. Designed to enable two-way communication, the Green Book also features surveys, questionnaires, and "fax-back" forms that can be used to request information, ideas and assistance from the agency or to alert the agency of a publicity opportunity.

Updated quarterly to take advantage of seasonal opportunities or recent events and trends, the Green Book provides valuable information and recommendations on programs such as sponsorships, community events, tie-ins with nearby businesses, fundraising and donations, advertising and publicity, special promotions and more.

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