Setting a heating company’s target customers

The question

A home heating company sells new heating systems to homeowners, along with a plan that looks after them afterwards. Its marketing team wanted to know whom to put first.

The choice would shape where media money went and how the offer was described. Settled separately, the targeting and the offer could each look right and still miss each other, so both had to rest on one description of the customer.

Our approach

We surveyed homeowners across the market beside the company’s own customers, so the base it already had sat in the same picture as the market it wanted to grow.

The segments were built from attitudes to the home, to heating and to energy, then profiled on what people would consider buying, how they research a purchase and how they prefer to pay. Every segment was sized across the market, so choosing a priority meant choosing between groups of people the team could count.

What the team came away with

Marketing had a sized customer segmentation, with pen portraits, profiles and a targeting rationale for each segment, and its current customers mapped onto the same segments.

The customer survey was kept short and built around the questions that place someone in a segment. That let the company see where its existing buyers sat in the market without commissioning a separate piece of research.

One description of each segment could now serve targeting, the wording of the offer and the briefs that go to agencies, so the media plan and the offer could be aimed at the same people.