Branding strategy for builders merchants
A company operating in a building product 'commodity' market needed to evaluate how its products were seen by its end-users in order to determine the level and type of brand support needed. It was currently spending a large amount of money promoting its products to the end users, to pull sales through its builders' merchant distributors. It was also keen to find out how the end users ordered the product so that it could determine if its builders' merchants were deliberately switching customers to a competitor's product.
Leading Edge undertook a programme of market research amongst the end users of this company's product and found that the vast majority of customers were unfocused on product and instead focused on the distributor outlet.
The picture of the market lead to a different brand strategy being followed to increase sales, as it was clear that advertising to end users would only affect a small proportion of them, whereas incentivising merchants' counter staff could have a much bigger impact.