Wolseley

Wolseley UK is the country’s largest specialist merchant distributor of plumbing, heating, cooling, and infrastructure products, catering to trade professionals. The Marketing Team at Wolseley asked Eureka to conduct research into the wants and needs of trade professionals that purchase and install heating spares. This is a sector that is in significant flux at the moment with businesses being impacted by macro factors such as labour shortages, diminishing skillsets, material price rises and changing job demands alongside both societal changes and manufacturers driving significant change.

Wolseley needed to understand the core audience, what they value from a merchant, pain points, etc and a critical view on the impacts of renewable technologies.

The best way to get a detailed picture of ‘real-life’ behaviour was to set up a programme of qualitative in-depth interviews. Qualitative interviews are an ideal methodology in this sector because:

• Stakeholders are time poor and not inclined to take part in an online quantitative survey,
• Following a semi-structured topic guide as an underlying framework, the researcher can delve into and explore topics of specific interest,
• Excellent for building trust and rapport with the respondent and business more widely,
• Face to face (online) appointments allow more sensitive issues around procurement or suppliers to be discussed more openly.

The results of this research are now helping guide the Wolseley team in their spares offer, ensuring they are correctly positioned to meet the needs of their core customers in this evolving sector.