The solution

With the realisation that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is no longer relevant to tradespeople, Eureka! designed a research project that would identify and bring to life the most pertinent groups that Plumbase should concentrate on. After conducting over 500 interviews with customers and non-customers, we undertook a deep dive of the data and created a bespoke trade customer segmentation. Segmentation is the advanced statistical technique used by market researchers and data scientists to create a best-fit model based on a host of survey or transactional data held by a business.

After reducing the number of variables at our disposal, our clever software here at Eureka! HQ worked out which combination of the data was the optimum way of describing the target clusters. Richard and Dave then weaved in a big more magic, based on our 40 years of collective experience of talking with trade customers, to arrive at the optimum number of customer segments. We then conducted focus groups to validate the segments and ‘bring to life’ a series of pen portraits, using real-life anecdotes to illustrate service expectations in branch, the appeal of rival brands and the stresses and strains of working on the tools.