BACKGROUND
Landscape Management is a property of North Coast Media. This trade magazine evolved to its current form in 1999 and focuses solely on helping green industry professionals grow their landscaping and lawn business.
SITUATION
While the redesign cycle is typically 5 years for North Coast Media Publications, Landscape Management was last redesigned in 1999 with a minor facelift in 2009. We were commissioned in 2014 to go beyond a redesign to provide the intelligence and insights necessary for rebranding the publication.
PROCESS
Research was conducted in the spring of 2014 with landscape company owners as well as Landscape Management’s advertisers. The research was both qualitative and quantitative in nature, designed to capture the point-of-view of the target audience to better align their needs with the content and design of LM. Most notably, a focus group was conducted where landscape firm owners designed their ideal trade publication drawing from the pages of both industry and non-industry magazines.
INSIGHTS
The research revealed the struggles and determination of landscape company owners in an extremely competitive, and sometimes unfair, market environment. Their passion for the outdoors and the craft alone was not enough to sustain continuous growth.
CORE ESSENCE
With a focus on the important content identified by the research – expanding, managing, efficiency and other directly related to growing the business, the core essence was identified as simply: GROWTH.
RESULTS
The brand, content and design were directed by this well-grounded resonating direction, ignited the interest of readers and dollars from advertisers. Every aspect and touch point of the brand now reinforces this direction including the tagline: “Your Guide to Growth,” and the new logo above.
