Plumbase

The merchant plays a pivotal role in the life of a tradesperson. It is a place to pick up products for the day, get technical advice, arrange site deliveries, hear about new innovations and also grab a few crucial minutes to socialise. This model has worked extremely well for national merchants in particular, who have the buying power but also the ability to offer a traditional type of branch service.

The plumbing and heating sector has a core of merchants who have dominated for a long period of time. Plumbase identified that installer’s expectations were beginning to evolve, using a wider blend of channels to purchase and check product. The omni-channel brands of Screwfix and Toolstation were also making significant inroads. Although we know older customers specialising in heating are far more loyal to the national merchant, Plumbase needed a way to make sure they stay relevant to younger tradespeople going forward and roll out a strategy that plays to their core strength – the local branch.

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 research software worked out which combination of the data was the optimum way of describing the target clusters, before we used our 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.