2018 ASHS Annual Conference

The strain on potable water supplies heightens the competition for water resources and potentially reduces demand for outdoor plantings and landscaping. Approximately 35% of domestic potable water is used for irrigation, 45% is used for thermoelectric production, but only 9% for public potable water supplies. Lifestyle influences water use. For individuals with high aesthetic and recreational priorities, outdoor water use is high. Recent research suggests attitudes towards the uses of potable water supplies have changed in other countries due to greater social awareness and increasingly widespread exposure to drought conditions. Education about and adoption of sustainable water use practices may help ensure an adequate supply of irrigation water while conserving water sources for human and ecosystem services. Other research suggests that consumers are willing to pay more for plants grown using more environmentally-friendly practices, including water conservation in plant production. We hypothesized that water conservation involvement and expertise may be negatively related to plant expertise and involvement and the importance of landscaping since individuals with high aesthetic and recreational priorities, use more water outdoors.

We conducted an online survey with 1,543 respondents in 2016 to ascertain their water conservation and plant expertise and involvement, horticultural importance, and demographic characteristics using a principal component analysis with orthogonal rotation which is used to describe the strength and direction of correlated variables in terms of their potential to quantify unobservable constructs. We then took the component results and conducted a K-means cluster analysis to find groupings in the data. Cluster analysis results identified two key market segments comprising ~50% of the sample each: those who are Actively Interested in Water Conservation and those who are Passively Disinterested in Water Conservation. Results show the Actively Interested Cluster segment spent almost twice as much as the Passively Disinterested segment in spending on plants and related supplies excluding equipment in 2015 and 2016. The Actively Interested in Water Conservation segment also purchased more annuals, vegetable transplants, herb transplants, perennials, flowering shrubs, evergreen shrubs, fruit producing trees, evergreen trees and shade trees in 2016. Findings suggest that pro-water conserving attitudes are found among consumers who value outdoor landscapes and those individuals who spent more on plants. Results suggest that producers and retailers should focus marketing and communication efforts on low-water use cultivar selection and operationalizing water conserving behaviors more than convincing consumers that plant purchases and landscaping are important.