Branding Research for Home Improvement
In home improvement, your brand lives in two minds at once. A DIY consumer choosing wall paint in a superstore aisle decides in seconds, guided by recognition, packaging, and shelf position. A professional painter or kitchen fitter buys in the same category through a wholesaler, guided by fifteen years of habit and trade reputation. Branding research for home improvement measures both. We track awareness, consideration, preference, brand image, and NPS among DIY consumers via online surveys (CAWI) and among painters, handymen, and kitchen and bathroom fitters via phone interviews (CATI), often within the same integrated study.
30+
Years of focused research on home improvement, construction, and installation
7
Home improvement subsectors covered in branding studies, from paint to kitchens
Dual-audience design as standard: DIY consumers (CAWI) and trade professionals (CATI) in one harmonized study
European Home Improvement Monitor and Painter Insight Monitor: proprietary syndicated benchmarks for brand metrics
What We Measure
Brand Funnel Metrics - Measured Separately for Consumers and Trade
Unaided awareness: top-of-mind brand recall in a given product category, without prompting. Mental availability in the buying situation, which means the superstore aisle or webshop for consumers and the wholesale counter for professionals. Aided awareness: recognition from a prompted list of brands, benchmarking your visibility against competitors and private labels in each audience. Consideration: inclusion in the active evaluation set at the moment of purchase, or at the moment a painter quotes a job. Trial / first purchase: the first purchase event, isolating conversion from familiarity to behavior. Regular use / preferred brand: share of category purchases over the past 12 months for consumers, share of jobs for professionals. Advocacy / NPS: likelihood to recommend, with verbatim reasoning.
Brand Image and Associations
Core attribute battery: quality perception, value for money, innovation, sustainability credentials, range breadth, availability, rated on agreement scales for your brand and competitors. Subsector-specific attributes: for paint, coverage and opacity reputation, color range, low-VOC credentials. For power tools, durability, battery platform ecosystem, service network. For bathroom products, design appeal, water-saving credentials, ease of installation. For kitchens, design range and delivery reliability. The DIY vs trade perception gap: the same brand often holds two different realities. Consumers see a lifestyle brand built by advertising. A painter sees product performance, job after job. We quantify that gap because it determines where your brand investment should go. Private label benchmarking: how your brand stands against retailer own brands on price-value perception, a defining pressure in paint, sundries, and tools. Intended positioning vs perceived positioning: structured gap analysis between what the brand claims and what each audience actually believes.
Competitive Positioning
Brand funnel comparison vs. 3-6 named competitors, including private labels where relevant. Perceived differentiation: what makes your brand distinctively different in the mind of a DIY consumer vs. a professional decorator vs. a retail category buyer. Share of preference in realistic purchase scenarios. Conversion gap analysis by audience and channel: DIY superstore, specialist retail, online, wholesale.
Brand Equity and Loyalty
Loyalty indicators: exclusive use, share of wallet, switching intent, and switching triggers such as price promotion, out-of-stock, or retailer recommendation. Willingness to pay a premium vs. private label and vs. a named competitor. NPS by segment, channel, and country, with statistical comparison to prior waves.
Brand Consistency
Perception gaps between DIY consumers and trade professionals. A brand strong at retail but weak at the trade counter has a structurally different problem from the reverse. Perception gaps across channels: what online buyers believe vs. superstore shoppers vs. specialist retail customers. Perception gaps across geographies: strong in the Netherlands, invisible in Poland is a different problem from weak everywhere.
Subsectors Covered
Subsector
Paint
One brand, two realities. DIY recognition built at retail, decorator loyalty built at the trade counter. Brand tracking runs consumer CAWI and painter CATI in parallel. Private label pressure is strong and must be benchmarked, not ignored.
Subsector
Hand and Power Tools
Trade loyalty is built on durability experience and battery platform lock-in. The consumer side is driven by retail visibility and gifting occasions. Two funnels with different drivers, tracked in one study.
Subsector
Bathroom Products
A decision triangle of homeowner, installer, and sometimes architect. Brand studies must capture installer recommendation influence alongside consumer preference, because the fitter's word often decides the purchase.
Subsector
Kitchen Products
High-consideration purchases with retail, fitter, and interior designer influence. Brand image around design range, quality perception, and delivery reliability carries most of the weight.
Subsector
Flooring
LVT growth is reshaping the category's brand structure. Consumer brand awareness is typically low and retailer or fitter recommendation is decisive, so brand studies weight the trade and retail audiences accordingly.
Subsector
Outdoor and Gardening
Seasonal and weather-driven purchasing. Brand recall is measured in the context of garden centers vs DIY superstores, because channel shapes which brands consumers encounter at all.
Subsector
Decorative Sundries
Brushes, rollers, fillers, tape, and preparation products. Low consumer involvement, strong painter habit. Trade NPS and switching data carry most of the strategic value in this subsector.
This is a portion of the home improvement subsectors we cover.
How Branding Research Works for Home Improvement - Example Project
A decorative paint manufacturer holds strong shelf presence in DIY retail but suspects professional decorators see the brand as a consumer product, not a trade product. Trade volume is flat while a competitor grows through the wholesale channel. The client wants to know whether the problem is awareness, image, or availability, and what would change it. We run parallel fieldwork in the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany. 75 professional painters per country, recruited directly by phone (CATI), and 300 DIY consumers per country who bought wall paint in the past 12 months, surveyed online (CAWI). Both questionnaires share the same funnel architecture and an 18-attribute image battery, so consumer and trade results are directly comparable. NPS is collected with open-ended driver probing. The competitive set includes five brands plus the leading private label. Analysis shows a healthy consumer funnel: aided awareness 81%, consideration 47%. The trade funnel breaks at image, not awareness. Painters know the brand (aided awareness 78%) but rate it low on “covers in one coat”, “available at my wholesaler”, and “made for professionals”. Driver analysis ranks wholesale availability and a dedicated trade product line as the two attributes most predictive of painter consideration. The client launches a trade line with a wholesale distribution push. A second wave 12 months later measures whether painter consideration moves. This is an illustrative example. Actual scope, sample sizes, and countries depend on your brief.
Target Audiences
This is a portion of the audiences we cover.
DIY consumers and homeowners
Core audience for the consumer brand funnel, screened for category purchase in the past 12-24 months. Reached by CAWI
Professional decorators and painters
Critical trade audience for paint and sundries brands. Strong brand loyalty, wholesale channel buying, and direct recommendation power over consumer choices. Reached by CATI
Handymen and general contractors
Install flooring, fit bathrooms, and undertake full room refurbishments. Significant influence over brand substitution on do-it-for-me jobs. Reached by CATI
Kitchen and bathroom fitters
Specialist trade professionals with high brand awareness and strong wholesaler relationships. Their recommendation frequently becomes the consumer's decision. Reached by CATI
Interior designers
Specification influence rather than direct buying in most categories. Relevant for kitchen, bathroom, and flooring brand studies. Reached by IDI or video call
DIY and specialist retailers
Ranging decisions determine which brands consumers encounter at all. Their perception of your brand shapes shelf presence and promotional support. Reached by IDI or CATI
Our Advantage
Home improvement is two markets wearing one name. A paint brand's consumer funnel and trade funnel often tell opposite stories, and a study that covers only one of them produces a misleading picture. Generalist agencies typically run a consumer panel study and call it brand tracking. We design dual-audience studies as standard, with harmonized questionnaires that make the DIY vs trade gap a measured number rather than a guess, because we have worked exclusively in this sector for over 30 years.
We do not use trade panels. Every painter, handyman, and fitter in our studies is recruited directly by phone and verified as an active practitioner. This produces response quality that online panels cannot match for trade audiences, and it means the loyalty and switching data your strategy depends on comes from people who actually buy and recommend in the category.
Our syndicated studies give your results context that ad hoc research cannot. The European Home Improvement Monitor and the Painter Insight Monitor provide normative benchmarks for funnel metrics, purchase behavior, and brand dynamics. A 38% painter consideration score means something different when you can compare it against category norms, and our tracking studies are built for clean wave-on-wave comparison from day one.
Project Examples
Paint and Coatings - Branding
A global brand health tracking program ran among professional customers of a paint and coatings manufacturer across 22 countries. The study measured the full brand funnel, NPS, and brand imagery with one harmonized methodology, replacing inconsistent local KPI tracking. The client gained a centralized brand KPI platform with per-market recommendations.
22 countries
Adhesives and Sealants - Branding
A brand health study among installers, handymen, and pool builders in the Netherlands and France measured the full brand funnel for an adhesives and sealants brand. Driver analysis identified a conversion gap at the consideration-to-trial stage, driven primarily by perceptions of limited product range and insufficient visibility at trade counter level.
NL, FR
Painting Tools - Brand Strength and Satisfaction
A quantitative study among professional painters in Germany and the UK measured brand strength and satisfaction for a painting tools manufacturer. The study combined funnel metrics with satisfaction and loyalty measurement, identifying which product and service attributes sustained the brand's premium position against cheaper alternatives.
DE, UK
Flooring - Branding
A brand tracker for a commercial flooring manufacturer ran among architects across Germany, the UK, and France, measuring funnel, image, and brand performance. Results showed where the brand was losing specification share and which image attributes separated it from the category leader, giving marketing a concrete attribute agenda.
DE, UK, FR
Deliverables
- Dual-audience brand funnel report: consumer and trade funnels side by side per country, awareness through advocacy for your brand and named competitors, with statistical significance testing on key differences
- Image positioning maps per audience: perceptual maps placing your brand vs. competitors and private labels on key attribute dimensions, generated from factor analysis of the image battery data, one for consumers and one for trade
- NPS scorecard: overall and segmented NPS by audience, channel, and country, with benchmark context from the European Home Improvement Monitor and Painter Insight Monitor where available
- Driver analysis output: ranked list of attributes that most strongly predict consideration and NPS in each audience, with regression coefficients translated into plain-language strategic implications
- DIY vs trade gap analysis: structured comparison of how consumers and professionals perceive your brand, identifying where one audience's strength masks the other's weakness
- Wave comparison deck (tracking clients): slide-ready comparison of current vs. prior wave with trend lines, change significance flags, and narrative explanation of movements
- Country profiles: one-page summary per market showing funnel metrics, key image attributes, private label pressure, and brand position relative to local competitors
- Recommendations chapter: specific, prioritized actions tied to the data, covering which audience to prioritize, which attribute gaps to address, and where competitive vulnerability is highest
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Do we need both consumers and trade professionals in one brand study?
Usually yes, if your category sells through both retail and trade channels. Paint, tools, sundries, and bathroom products all carry two funnels with different drivers. Measuring only consumers hides trade weakness, and vice versa. If your category is genuinely single-audience, we will say so and scope accordingly.
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How do you reach professional painters and fitters - do you use panels?
No. We recruit trade professionals directly by phone (CATI). Trade panels in home improvement are low quality and respondents are often not active practitioners. Phone recruitment produces verified professionals and reliable verbatim responses.
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What sample sizes do we need?
For consumers, 200-300 respondents per country via CAWI is typical, screened for category purchase. For trade professionals, 75-150 interviews per audience per country via CATI. A three-country study covering consumers and painters typically lands between 850 and 1,350 interviews in total.
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Can you benchmark our brand against private labels?
Yes, and in paint, sundries, and tools you should. Private labels are measured on the same funnel metrics and image attributes as branded competitors, including willingness to pay a premium against them. That quantifies exactly how much brand equity protects your price position.
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How do you keep multi-country results comparable?
One master questionnaire, adapted by in-country teams for language and local competitive sets, with identical question architecture and scales in every market. Data is coded into a single harmonized framework, so a consideration score in Germany means the same thing as one in France.
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What does brand tracking tell us beyond awareness scores?
The value is in conversion gaps and drivers. Why a brand with 81% consumer awareness converts poorly among painters, or which specific image attributes block trial. Driver analysis ranks attributes by their statistical impact on consideration and NPS, so you know where investment will actually move the funnel.
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How long does a home improvement brand study take?
A dual-audience brand health study across 3 markets typically takes 6-10 weeks from briefing to final report. Larger country sets add 2-4 weeks. Repeat tracking waves run faster once methodology and questionnaire are established.
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