How Shopping Experience Shapes DIY Store Satisfaction

Every year, we focus on branding in the home improvement sector in one of the quarterly reports of our European Home Improvement Monitor. Aside from measuring consumers’ awareness of brands of home improvement products in 14 categories, we also measure their satisfaction with DIY stores they buy such products.

The results show which DIY stores consumers are most satisfied with in 11 European countries. In the analysis published in March 2023, the highest-rated DIY stores in Europe are Leroy Merlin, Castorama and HUBO, all getting almost the same general satisfaction rating.

The March 2023 article reported the same top three as its preceding comparison. Compared to this slightly underwhelming revelation of who is at the top, it is far more interesting to know how to get to that top. What does a DIY store have to do well to truly satisfy its customers and distinguish itself from competitors?

The shopping experience has the most influence on customer satisfaction with DIY stores

To understand how DIY stores can distinguish themselves, we did not just measure consumers’ general satisfaction with DIY stores, but also their satisfaction with certain aspects. We also measure how important each aspect is for their general satisfaction with the DIY store. That importance tells us which aspects you need to excel at to be at the very top of European DIY stores in terms of customer satisfaction.

The aspect that influences consumers’ general satisfaction the most is the shopping experience. The power of this shopping experience should not be underestimated, as this most influential aspect is followed at quite a distance by product quality. So providing your customers with an excellent shopping experience is a good way for a DIY store to distinguish itself. This can help existing customers recommend the store and support brand awareness.

Sustainability does not seem to influence customer satisfaction much

In third place, it seems that price is a lot less important. Following closely, the service and advice provided at DIY stores do not seem to influence consumers’ general satisfaction with those stores that much either. At the very bottom of the list, we find sustainability. Despite the fact that sustainability is an enormously hot topic in general, it seems to influence satisfaction with DIY stores the least.

That does not necessarily mean that DIY stores should not bother with sustainability though. We are merely talking about the influence of sustainability on customer satisfaction. This does not necessarily mean that sustainability has no influence on consumers’ choice of a certain DIY store. We know from previous research that sustainability can indeed sway that choice in a more sustainable direction.

The Q3 2021 Store-Image Study

Brand image research is an excellent tool to see how a brand is doing in a certain market sector. That does not only count for brands of home improvement products, but also for the stores in which those products are sold. That is why we regularly measure consumers’ image of DIY stores in USP Marketing Consultancy’s European Home Improvement Monitor.

In Q3 2021 we asked 6,600 consumers from 11 European countries to score their opinion of DIY stores. As it turns out, Leroy Merlin has the best image in Europe, followed by Castorama, Hubo, Praxis and Brico. When looking at consumers’ opinion of specific aspects like pricing, quality, shopping experience, service and advice or sustainability, a more detailed picture appears in which other DIY stores like B&Q and Gamma also enter the European top 5 of some aspects.

These general image scores may show the status quo of the DIY stores we measured, but are by themselves not very useful for future strategies. To truly understand how to improve the image consumers have of your store, you need to know which aspects of DIY stores consumers truly care about.
The Q3 2021 findings show how important five aspects of DIY stores actually are for their image among consumers. Some are somewhat obvious, as it is not surprising that price and quality of the products matter. What is really striking, however, is the importance consumers give to their shopping experience. Of all aspects, shopping experience affects their general opinion the most, much more than the other aspects.

In the light of the e-commerce trend that physical stores have increasingly been struggling with over the past decades, this is good news. If consumers find their shopping experience important, that means that very shopping experience is the key to attract them to physical stores. Among their physical competitors, DIY stores can distinguish themselves by providing their customers with the best shopping experience.

This goes to show that, to know how to improve the image of a DIY store, merely knowing whether your store scores high on a certain aspect is not enough. Both for the DIY stores and for manufacturers whose home improvement products are sold in those stores, it is more important to know whether and to what extent your customers value the key aspects of a DIY store.

A high rating on an aspect is not the same as that aspect having the strongest relationship with the overall store rating. The published discussion ranks the factors by their importance to overall opinion; it does not supply the model specification or prove that changing one factor will cause a fixed increase in sales.

The 2021 research shows the importance of five aspects for the image European consumers have of DIY stores in general, but these differ per country and area. For a detailed overview of consumers’ opinion of DIY stores in 11 European countries, we refer you to the Q3 2021 report of USP Marketing Consultancy’s European Home Improvement Monitor. Researched DIY stores include AKI, B&Q, Bauhaus, Brico, Brico io, Bricocenter, Bricorama, Byggmax, Castorama, Clas Ohlson, Depot, Gamma, Homebase, Hornbach, Hubo, jem&fix, Karwei, Lagerhaus, Leroy Merlin, Mr Bricolage, Mrówka, OBI, Praxis, Screwfix, Silvan, Toom, Wickes and XL byg.

Focus on the right aspects to optimise satisfaction, loyalty and turnover

This shows that DIY stores, or any company really, can truly satisfy its customers and distinguish itself from competitors by focusing on the individual aspects that customers find most important. The two top stores are not winning on price, for instance. They are not even in the top five regarding attractive prices. But they do get the highest general satisfaction ratings because they provide their customers with the best shopping experience.

But what makes a good shopping experience? In this research, we focused on five main aspects when measuring customer satisfaction with DIY stores. For a more detailed picture, these can be broken down into more specific aspects of the entire customer journey. That is what we do in our dedicated customer satisfaction research, which shows our clients which aspects they should focus on to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and thus, turnover.

Please contact USP Marketing Consultancy for any enquiries about customer satisfaction research or any of our market research disciplines. For an overview of consumers’ opinions of DIY stores in 11 European countries and home improvement brand performance in 14 categories, we refer you to USP Marketing Consultancy’s European Home Improvement Monitor.