For manufacturing companies, spurring market share growth is not always about developing new products, but also about refining and improving sales of your existing products—by improving how you distribute and advertise them—to expand your brand recognition and market share among trade professionals.
Continuous product design and product improvements remain necessary to align with changes in contractors’ research and buying habits, as well as what they need from manufacturers, according to the 2024 Building Products Customer Guide we released in partnership with Venveo.
How Speciality Tradespeople Differ from other Contractors
Not all pros think, act, or make building product purchases the same way or for the same reasons.
Below, we are going to focus on unpacking the behaviors and attitudes of residential and commercial specialty tradespeople, which includes:
- Carpenters
- Electricians
- Painters
- Flooring Installers
- HVAC
- Landscapers
- Roofers
- Plumbers
- Decking/Fence Installers
- Drywall Installers
- Siding Installers
- Window/Door Installers
If you are looking to better understand how to increase building materials sales among builders, remodelers, and GCs, this article will provide better guidance.
How Specialty Tradespeople Choose Building Products in 2024
In a nutshell, here’s what you need to know about how specialty tradespeople are shopping for, and ultimately purchasing products in 2024:
- Better prices have surpassed availability as the leading cause for supplier changes, and although availability is improving and price pressures are expected to ease, they still present challenges.
- Residential specialty tradespeople find new brands most commonly while in-store or on supplier and manufacturer websites or through word of mouth. Commercial speciality tradespeople are more accessible on social media than residential pros.
- Further, the larger and more sophisticated the individual or company, the more likely they are to discover brands online.
- Specialty tradespeople conduct significant research both in-store and online. Ensuring consistency across platforms is critical to making this robust omni-channel marketing effort work.
Top Product Purchase Drivers Among Specialty Tradespeople
The top four purchase drivers among residential specialty tradespeople are:
- Quality
- Availability
- Price
- Ease of Install
The top four purchase drivers among commercial specialty tradespeople are:
- Quality
- Availability
- Ease of Install
- Sustainability
Take note that, while price does not make the top list of purchase drivers for commercial specialty tradespeople, it is still important to them. In fact, at least 2 in 3 commercial pros reported every single one of the 7 purchase drivers studied to be a purchase driver for them.
How Channel Use Has Changed over the last 4 Years
As of 2023, in-person purchases have steadily increased year over year since 2020 and indicate a return to pre-2020 channel norms. The current frequency of online purchases, however, varies significantly based on company size, project type and product category.
Residential specialty trades make more of their purchases from big box stores including Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Menards. Commercial tradespeople are making purchases from a larger variety of suppliers, often using LBMs and specialty suppliers in addition to mass retailers.
Among both residential and commercial specialty tradespeople, willingness to try a new building product is especially elevated during years when material availability is a top challenge, like in 2021 and 2023. A full 1 in 2 commercial pros and then 1 in 3 residential pros answered, “Yes,” when asked, “Have you tried a new building product or home improvement supplier for the first time in the past year?”
In further findings reported by the Home Improvement Research Institute, More pros (3 in 5) would opt to find a different supplier to make their purchase if their preferred brand was unavailable through their current supplier. In contrast, 2 in 5 would opt to purchase a different brand.
Between 2020 and 2023, distinct differences also emerged in the number of pros who were able to purchase their preferred brands. The most notable differences emerged in the following product categories:
- +16% in Paint & Paint Supplies
- +13% in Hand or Power Tools
- +9% in Windows and Doors
- +8% in Major Appliances
- +6% in Interior Building Supplies
- (-6%) in Smart Home Devices
How Sources for Conducting Product Research and Finding New Brands Have Changed Over the Past 4 Years
Our market researchers uncovered four significant shifts in how specialty tradespeople source new brands now compared to in 2020:
- In-aisle sourcing for new projects has increased among residential pros, such that now one in two residential tradespeople sourced new brands in store in 2023, compared to just 1 in 3 doing so in 2020.
- Sourcing new brand options from in-store sales people also increased among residential specialty tradespeople over the past 4 years, up from 1 in 5 in 2020 to now 1 in 3 as of 2023.
- Online advertising and other digital mediums remain effective among commercial specialty tradespeople to drive brand awareness campaigns. In fact, in 2023, 1 in 3 commercial tradespeople reported using social media to source new brands, up nearly double from 2020.
How Tradespeople Think
Because behaviors are about the stories we tell ourselves, it’s important that you accurately understand the narrative that specialty tradespeople find themselves to be a part of. The Farnsworth Group’s Building Products Customer study unpacks the psychographics and attitudes held by specialty tradespeople, including:
- A deep-seeded pride in their technical craftsmanship that they have honed over years and decades. This pride extends into the tools and materials they choose to use.
- A fear of being under-valued and under-appreciated.
- A priority for upholding and preserving their reputation and the quality of their work, as this is often the lifeblood of their new business opportunities.
- Brand loyalty varies by category; don’t let salespeople get complacent in sales activities with previous/repeat customers
- Specialty tradespeople are skeptical by nature and, ultimately, they trust themselves and they trust others like them (Pro influencers).
To attract and delight these customers, you can consider ways of
- Getting pro influencers talking about using your products. 44% of residential tradespeople and 62% of commercial tradespeople follow one or more Pro influencers.
- Providing self service options, and helpful resources such as estimating tools, visualizers, and quick search options, ultimately finding ways to empower speciality trades customers wherever you can.
- Aligning with their values on quality; this effort will align with their goals to preserve their reputation and reduce potential callbacks and also align with their goals to increase jobsite safety and ease of install.
- Helping make them look good to their customers by providing them with timeline communications about material availability and order arrival times.
Demographically, based on our findings reported in the 2024 Building Products Customer Guide, nearly two in three residential speciality tradespeople (61%) are operating in companies with an annual revenue under $500,000. In contrast, the majority (53%) of commercial specialty tradespeople are operating in companies with annual revenues of $1 million or more.
The majority of speciality tradespeople are also Millennials, which distinctly influences how they research for, shop for, and ultimately purchase building products.
What Strategies Attract Younger Pros to Existing Products?
There’s no silver bullet for attracting new customers, but customized market research delivers the data you need to effectively address the purchase motivations and buying habits of various contractor segments. Whether it’s tenure, size of company, or type of work.
It’s important to look at how demographics within the building and home improvement industry are changing, as you work to plan years in advance. For example, millennials now form a significant portion of the professional workforce. Soon, Gen Z will also play a major role in your branding, product development, distribution and go-to-market strategies as they start taking up jobs in the trades. Efforts to capture market share in these generational categories among Contractor buyer personas need to be underway.
You must offer in-depth, clearly communicated information, easily accessible whenever the mood strikes these younger professionals, a seamless digital purchase experience, consistency across physical and online platforms, and engaging tools, such as product visualizers, cost calculators and 3D imagery, according to our Builder Products Customer report findings.
How Do You Target a Pro with an Existing Product?
Sometimes it is how your product is packaged, distributed and marketed that gets in the way of appealing to potential customers, not necessarily your product itself. As the saying goes, perception equals reality.
Consider research to understand:
- Who is and is not using your product?
- What brand, perceptions, product attributes come to mind among customers?
- Have iterative product improvement adequately addressed the use cases necessary to become the preferred brand?
- Do contractors gain credibility by association with your brand?
Then consider the same questions regarding your direct competitors. Your company can modify the way it’s selling to contractors in order to reach them with an existing product and compel them to make the purchase against their lineup of options.
Commissioning Custom Market Research to Improve Existing Products
Market research helps you discover what problems contractors are trying to solve, as well as how they use the products and what features and benefits are most important to them. What improvements do they desire to existing products? How much do features impact product preference, or is it mostly about leveraging product availability? There are both qualitative and quantitative research methods you can use to gather the data you need to strategically improve product quality and to test different product concepts.
Here are a couple research tools to help you improve an existing product so it appeals to more trade professionals:
Customer Usage, Attitude and Behavior Research
If your product doesn’t currently attract as many customers as you would like or satisfy their needs in the way you expect, a change is needed. But how will you know what that necessary change is without diving deeper?
By researching customer usage, attitude and behavior, you collect data and insights that allow you to assess a customer’s purchase behavior and understand what really drives and motivates their decisions across their buyer’s journey. This information is a useful guide for product development.
Part of usage and attitude (U&A) research has to do with product selection and satisfaction. In other words, what impacts a customer’s decision to purchase a particular product? What attributes of a product impact overall satisfaction? This data gives you insight into what attributes are essential, which can assist you in making meaningful and effective improvements to an existing product that isn’t performing well.
Product Development Research
Another step to improving one of your company’s products is to conduct product development research, thereby gaining a better understanding of customer motivations, feature and benefit preferences, and appealing packaging options for an enhanced or modified product.
There are three main components to product development research: discovery, concept testing and pricing research. During the discovery stage, you uncover the uses, needs and opportunities for the product in question.
- How are customers currently using it? Where? Why?
- Do the products that are now available (including yours or your competitors’) meet all their needs?
- What don’t they like about your product?
- What improvements do they want to see?
- What solutions have they implemented to solve for shortcomings of the product?
The next step is concept testing, or evaluating which ideas for product improvements are worth pursuing and investing in. During this stage of market research, you can investigate what customers think of your new concepts, which are preferred and why, and which new features resonate the most. You’ll also discover how willing customers would be to try your product, once certain improvements are made, and how likely they would be to buy it. Some of the research techniques used for concept testing include A/B or monadic testing; product usage trials; and MaxDiff scaling.
Finally, you need to engage in pricing research. If you’re going to modify or enhance an existing product, what is a reasonable price that will ensure it remains competitive while covering the cost of your investment? During the pricing elasticity and feature valuation phase, there are various market research and modeling methods to give you a clear idea of which combinations of features are most desired and at what price point. With that data, you can develop an improved product and accompanying pricing strategy to increase your sales.
Additionally, you should keep your eye on external factors that could influence the need or desire for product modifications. This can be anything from widespread current events, like the response to covid-19, to state and federal legislation.
Marketing to Trade Professionals in 2024
Changing trade professional demographics, and subsequently the segment’s research and buying behaviors will influence the building industry in the short and long term. It’s important to invest in product improvements and new marketing strategies that take these trends into consideration. As contractors and trade professionals are increasingly open to trying or switching brands, there are new opportunities for manufacturers.
For more information on the factors and trends shaping the construction industry in the near future, request access to our latest Building Products Customer Guide below:
