Week 4 Part A: Defining a Target Market

     Armstrong Garden Centers is a large chain nursery that caters to the needs of the public rather than focusing on wholesale business to business sales. The main website is very large and is split into many sections for shopping, consultations, contact/location info, shopper benefits, and gardening information. The tagline of "Gardening without Guesswork" is very fitting considering all the resources and products they offer. The business is targeting individuals with interest in gardening or landscaping that both like to grow plants that are decorative or produce food. Armstrong also sells outdoor décor and furniture for individuals who garden to create lively spaces for their homes.  They're demographic is people that have a bit of disposable income and time to commit to buying and growing small herb gardens up to planning, buying, and maintaining lush and extravagant gardens or yards. The locations are all located in Southern California but the business is able to ship to the entire US with products that are local to Southern California as well as products that are not like bamboo.

    Rancho Vista Nursery, in comparison, is a much smaller local Southern California business that focuses on selling cacti and succulents ,rather than a large array of plants like Armstrong, to wholesalers to resell within California. The website is comprised of a single page with links that lead to contact them through email and to their social media links (Facebook and Instagram); other elements of their website include a small about us section, store news and operating hours/location, and snippets about succulents and cacti and their growing popularity in SoCal gardens and popular locations like Disneyland. Their tagline is "Quality Cactus and Succulents" but they're call to action of "Let's grow something together" feels closer to the approach they have as a local business. The nature of their business is to sell B2B so they're target would be city planners(beatification committees), landscapers, or other non-gardening business looking to spruce up their environment. Those buying their products most likely value and appreciate Southern California/desert plant life. There could also be an interest in a more water-conscious alternative in gardening whether it is for conservation of water or to reduce expenditures in water utilities for maintenance of gardens.

    The crossovers in both of the companies customers are those who have gardening needs and specifically those who would like to use cacti and succulents. Customers will also be those running businesses that provide landscaping and gardening plants to others. The value and attitudes of these customer's is also displayed with how they word succulents as being "water-wise" and "drought-tolerant" to those who would like to invest in an easy-maintenance garden. They seek to entice their customers into buying their succulents by describing them as exotic, striking, and beautiful plants that display the beauty of local California plant life.

    The most obvious differences in the websites are the variety of products that are supplied. Armstrong has a much larger and varied stock for a multitude of purposes and aesthetics while Rancho Vista Nursery focuses on one kind of plant life. Another key difference is the aesthetics of their websites. Armstrong has a more professional look with very clean web design and elements to display the many products and services they can provide; they also keep their colors uniform and vibrant and their layout is repeated throughout most of their website to ensure customers they are still on their website. The logo is a wordmark that has their business name and a tagline included with yellow, green, red as their colors (plus black and white); the logo is something that can be easily used for a variety of different promotional materials of varying sizes. RVN has a more rustic and homemade appeal and the website sticks to more earthy tones that fit well with the heartiness of succulents; the use of their wood background image and their decorative fonts in their headers also give a more friendly appeal that a local business relies on to maintain their business relations. One small difference that I noted was the quality of their images; Armstrong has high-quality and retouched images that appear to be professionally shot while RVN also has good images but look to have some focusing issues, minor lighting issues, and don't look to have been retouched to improve clarity. Their logo is not the strongest (I wasn't actually sure what their logo was...) as it uses a picture of a succulent and a decorative/handwritten font (could possibly be FFF Tusj) that will lose clarity when scaled up and down because of the raster image and all the hatched lines in the font; the appeal of the logo fits their branding but it may be something to reconsider down the line to better improve their branding.