Derek Bunker, owner of Alton Garden Centre at Wickford in Essex urged garden industry suppliers to spend time in garden centres talking and listening to customers rather than carry out focus groups when he addressed the Day Conference meeting of GIMA earlier this month.

"Focus groups, what a waste of time they are," Derek told delegates at the meeting which followed the GIMA AGM. "Why do you bother with focus groups? You've got garden centres full of customers. All you've got to do is send somebody into the centres, quietley, sit down or walk around, not with hats or big supplier logos on, mingle with the customers, listen and understand what it is they can't find, what questions they are asking and why can't they find what they are looking for?

"You may have a winner, you may have a looser. When you have focus groups they have a nice coffee and biscuits and tell you what you want to hear, they know who's invited them.

"Please don't use focus groups.  Sometimes the reason you're succesful is the complete opposite reason than you think. The reason it was succesful may have been the advertising but it could have been just that was that everybody elses products on the shelf were red and yours was yellow and it stood out.  Believe me it happens."

Derek asked why suppliers insist on changing the names of products and making the labels difficult for customers to work out what the product does.  "I've had to make my own sign to tell customers that Weedol Lawn Weedkiller is actually Verdone."

Holding his iphone up to the audience, Derek also has strong words for suppliers using e-mails instead of making phone calls to deal with supply issues.  "Did you know you can actually talk to people on an iphone?You can ring people up and there's someone on the other end who will talk to you rather than email. Surely its a lot easier to ring someone up and say look this is the issue I have than it is to put it all down in 15 scentences about what was wrong. 

"One of the things I want to say today is we should run computers we shouldn't let them run us. Were all on the same side, sometimes it feels like a threesome - I'm on one side and you guys and the computer are on the other.  If you put a new computer system in well, that's death to us in garden centres, we just know that is going to cause problems."

Derek also recounted a time when he met Horace Hagadorn at the Hardware Trade show in Chicago.  Horace thanked Derek for all the business he had done with him that year.  Derek replied; "and thank you for all
the money you've made me.

That is the spirit of garden centre and supplier realationships as far as Derek is concerend.  "That encapsulates what we should all really be doing.  Neither of us can survive without the other."