AFE Seeks Input on Consumer Research

The American Floral Endowment is currently mailing a questionnaire to all current donors asking: What market and/or consumer information would help you grow your business? The objective of this questionnaire is to define the next consumer and/or market research that Endowment funds will support.

In November, AFE held a summit meeting in Chicago with a representative group of industry leaders. The objective of this meeting was to enumerate and prioritize major industry research needs and use the information in setting Endowment research priorities. For meeting participants, who represented all industry segments, the most urgent need was marketing and consumer information. This questionnaire is the next step in the Endowment’s process of clearly defining the kind of consumer research that owul dbe of most value to the industry.

For more than 12 years, the Endowment has supported and coordinated industry support for “FloraStats,” a comprehensive consumer trend-tracking research. While there is an enormous amount of information available from this study, generating specific information and analyses from FloraStats is highly technical and requires extensive and expensive training. This, the research has only been available to the broad industry in very general reports. The Endowment now wants to redefine the industry’s consumer and market research needs and generate information that is useful and easily accessible to the industry.