COMMENT


COMMENT


Flushing out the plumbers merchant offer


Fiona Russell-Horne Editor-in-Chief - BMJ


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O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us


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ll merchants do similar things, but they are not the same. All exist to distribute building (and plumbing and decorating etc.) materials from manufacturers to tradesmen, builders, plumbers and end users. However they all do this is slightly different ways. So far so obvious. The very nature of this industry, populated so heavily as it is by independent businesses, means that what is suitable for one merchant or type of merchant, and is not going to work for another.


That was the basis for the Builders Merchants federation’s work over the past year on the segmentation of their membership. The plan, as announced at the 2018 BMF Members’ Day Conference, was to undergo some customer segmentation profiling work, thereby working out some broad categories that the membership falls into.


There are 700-plus members, and the Federation needed to understand every type of member, categorising them together in order to deliver a tailored package of value added services to meet those individual merchant requirements. As Chairman Peter Hindle said at the time, the requirements of a roofing merchant are very different from those of a plumbing merchant and the requirements of a merchant the size of, say, Merrit & Fryers, are very different from those of Travis Perkins or MKM.


That segmentation work has now been done and the six broad categories are: Focused Improvers, Active Influencers, Aspiring Progressives, Unignited Advancers and Plumbing and Heating merchants. The first two categories are highly engaged with the BMF, having a belief in what the association is


doing. They engage and feel a part of the whole. The other categories are reactive and tend to engage, if at all, on an ad-hoc basis. So the idea is that by working out which members fall into which categories, the BMF will be able to target its services and offer more specifically to all members.


I thought it was interesting that, alongside the marketing-speak title of the segments, there was plumbing and heating as a separate section. For plumbers merchants tend to be different to builders and mixed merchants, mainly because their core customers are plumbers. A plumber’s merchant, not a builder’s merchant. Seriously, if I had been given a pound every time over the past 25 years that someone told me their plumber customers like to be treated by specialists, with their own trade counters and, ideally, branches, I would be as rich as Charlie Mullins, the self-styled ‘posh-person’s-plumber’.


Is this the reason that Travis Perkins has spent the last year working out the divestment of its Plumbing and Heating division, the conclusion of which, I am told, is imminent? It hoovered up Jayhard and City Plumbing Supplies and a number of other plumber’s merchants about 15 years ago and its fortunes have been mixed. Or, at least, not as steady and stable as its core merchanting businesses? Is it also the reason why Grafton has just sold off its Plumbase business - which was its entry point into the UK market in the first place? Does plumbing and heating have such specialist needs that it’s best dealt with by its own set of specialist owners - in Plumbase’s case, the investment firm that also owns HPS, Willbond and PlumbCity? We’ll have to see.


www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net October 2019


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