How Catnic delivered by ‘Sticking with Orange’
Recognising the need for quality drywall joint tape in the market wasn’t difficult, as a premium brand we are continuously looking to successfully applying our insight to expand our existing portfolio. However it’s always a challenge to diversify your product range in a highly competitive market, especially when you’re the household name for Lintels.
Our expertises in steel manufacture aren’t necessarily aligned with a fibreglass joint tape, but it’s a product that compliments our plaster bead range perfectly. The new product, a 90m roll of drywall joint type is manufactured to exceed current market offerings, distinctively coloured to match the Catnic brand, and uniquely packaged to attract the buyer.
With quality, packaging and design all aligned the challenge is to ensure the product is launched at high-end quality and price points, offering incremental sales and margin opportunities to builder’s merchants by generating end users ‘pull through’ demand. The product is small with huge sales potential; to be successful the launch has to be concise and more importantly delivered on an economical budget.
Research conducted prior to the launch concluded that direct mail by major brands was limited to tradesmen, perceived as expensive when compared to digital alternatives. Viewing this as a potential vacuum, we considered direct mail as the perfect solution to ensure our campaign messages were delivered to the right people at the right time, linked with story telling via social media.
Generating demand from end users was priority, and in simplifying the campaign we sort to achieve 3 main objectives, increase number of new stockist, capture end users data for future marketing and understand promotion metrics for customers engaging with the brand.
Over 4000 end users received free merchandise if they bought in multiple qualities through the 3-month campaign period. An offer redeemed through stockists that received the offer preview to aid in securing new stockists prior to the campaign launch.
End users around the UK received an A5 direct mail piece advertising our new product; it’s USPs, details of the promotion and where to enter. Stockists who purchased prior to the campaign were offered FREE point of sale material to advertise in store, and the entire promotion was supported with a national advertising campaign in Professional Builder, the preferred printed media for the target audience.
Prior to launch we set national targets and metrics to monitor sales revenue and brand sentiment during the launch period, all significantly exceeded expectation.
Learning from our campaign results is fundamental to ensure the effective delivery of future promotions, and taking this opportunity to share them with you now will hopefully inspire future CMA winners.
A highly professional direct mail is a valuable medium for campaigns in the building products sector, and it’s the physical mail novelty that made this campaign stand out and engaged the end user. Supporting the direct mail with product rating through social media proved to be a lead generating tool for future case studies and a great source of gauging ‘real time’ brand sentiment throughout the promotion.
Our findings here have helped us to improve our understanding of the ‘pull’ effect through brand engagement with our stockist and end users and will help define KPI’s for future campaigns, i.e. the average uplift in sales value per SKU for new stockist was 27%.
As a result of the campaigns success, Catnic have secured unpredicted future brand loyalty with new stockists who are encouraging us to create new campaigns to emulate these results, and the Catnic Board of Directors have increased marketing spend within the current budget period on an evidence-basis based on the ROMI ratio experienced here.
Recognition by the Construction Marketing Awards has been a great allocate for those involved in the campaign, and we extend our thanks to CIMCIG for hosting a truly professional event. We encourage all those working in the building products sector to take part next year to help promote the hard work and terrific results delivered in our industry to help ensure construction marketing goes from strength to strength.
