As we enter a period where total revenues in the building products industry are expected to plateau, the pathway to growth is shifting. Instead of riding the wave of market expansion, building products brands are being challenged to win by capturing market share from competitors. In this environment, brands must move beyond intuition and generic industry reports to gain the sharp, actionable insights needed to outperform. That’s where in-depth, ongoing quantitative tracking research becomes important.
Navigating a Flat Market: The New Imperative
When the overall pie isn’t getting bigger, your focus should move squarely onto outpacing competitors, often by making smarter, customer-centric decisions. Brand health tracking and attitudinal/behavioral tracking research are now not just “nice to have,” but critical to understanding among your addressable market where your brand stands today, how it’s perceived, and what levers will drive future growth.
Brand Health Tracking: Your Performance Dashboard
Brand health tracking provides a regular read on key performance metrics such as awareness, consideration, preference, and advocacy among your target audiences. These metrics are your early warning system, highlighting shifts in perception or emerging gaps that competitors could exploit.
More importantly, regular brand tracking connects the dots between marketing activity and real-world impact. It allows you to diagnose why certain campaigns drive results while others fall flat, and gives you the evidence needed to defend investments or pivot quickly when necessary.
Attitudinal and Behavioral Tracking: Understanding the “Why” Behind Actions
Beyond simple awareness or preference, attitudinal and behavioral tracking digs deeper into how your audience thinks, feels, and acts.
- Are decision-makers becoming more price-sensitive?
- Has sustainability moved from a “bonus” to a “must-have” in product selection?
- What obstacles are driving brand switching or defection?
By quantifying these evolving attitudes and behaviors over time, you can anticipate market shifts, fine-tune your messaging, and align innovation efforts with what really matters to your customers.
The Farnsworth Group Advantage: Reaching Both Homeowners and Professionals
Most tracking research in the building products space is limited to end-user customers, often overlooking the critical influence of professionals, including remodelers, builders, trade pros, and architects. However, in many product categories, it’s these professionals who determine which brands are specified, purchased, and recommended. Their impact on sales and market share ranges from moderate to extreme, depending on the segment.
This is where The Farnsworth Group stands apart in providing custom market research. Our deep industry expertise, leading quality standards, and extensive networks enable us to deliver reliable, ongoing insights from both homeowners and professionals. We know that capturing the full market story requires both perspectives:
- Homeowners: The end-users whose attitudes, behaviors, and brand perceptions drive retail sales and DIY trends.
- Professionals: The specifiers and installers whose recommendations, purchasing practices, and brand loyalties have a direct effect on product selection and sales volume.
By combining these voices in a single tracking program, we provide a more complete and actionable view of your brand’s health and opportunities - something generalist research firms simply cannot replicate.
Why Primary Research is Non-Negotiable
When building products brands are looking to understand the broader market, secondary data can be an excellent starting point. Industry reports, syndicated studies, and public datasets offer a bird’s-eye view of high-level trends such as overall market growth, shifting demand, or economic headwinds.
However, when it comes to making major investments, launching new products, or setting strategic direction, relying solely on secondary data introduces real limitations, and risks. These resources are often too general, providing information that is accessible to everyone (including your competitors) and are unable to reflect the unique circumstances of your business or target customers.
Primary, quantitative tracking research from The Farnsworth Group provides you with:
- Brand-Specific Benchmarks: Metrics tailored to your objectives, not only generic industry averages.
- Granular Insights: The ability to segment results by channel, region, decision-maker type, or other key variables.
- Strategic Clarity: Direct feedback from both those who use your products and those who influence their selection, enabling you to focus on the levers that matter most.
The Bottom Line: Outpace, Don’t Just Compete
In today’s flat market, the difference between winning and standing still often comes down to better information - specifically, information that is exclusive to your brand and directly tied to your audience. Quantitative tracking research gives building products brands the intelligence needed to proactively shape strategy, defend share, and create competitive separation.
If you’re ready to outpace the competition with customized insights, The Farnsworth Group can help you build a tracking program tailored to your needs, delivering the confidence to make better decisions in uncertain times.
Written By Karen Barnes
Through her expertise in brand consulting, market research design, and advanced analytics, Karen has been helping answer critical business questions for the past 15 years. She has had the privilege of working with many of the top global insights organizations and applying best practices across a myriad of clients in CPG, technology, finance, healthcare, and of course home improvement, including developers, building products manufacturers, and retailers.
An Iowa native, Karen was upgrading from riding mowers to full combines at the annual John Deere employee fair by age 7. Now in Denver, she fills her off hours hiking the Rocky Mountains, uncovering the best local food & drink spots, and traveling as much of the world as humanly possible with her fiancé, Adam.
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