Bristan

Our ‘Day In the Life’ approach is an ethnographic technique that is suitable for the trade and construction sector whilst being underpinned by robust qualitative principles. Our researchers have worked with tradespeople for decades and then therefore credibly become an ‘trainee’ for the day, visiting jobs together, sitting in the van, visiting merchants and just generally ‘rolling up our sleeves’ for a day on the tools.

We used this technique to help Bristan answer their questions and shine a new light on gaps in their knowledge. We have developed a large pool of tradespeople who are happy with us to travel around with them ‘on the job’. This method allows us to observe interactions and ask questions that a quantitative survey could never touch.

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.