Background
Victoria Sawmills is a Clinton Devon Estate enterprise. They are timber specialists, offering a range of softwood timber solutions, from fencing and gates through to garden furniture and decking. There are two branches, East and North Devon, which serve a range of customers from retail, wholesaler through to the trade.
Challenge
The senior management team wanted to better understand their customer base, as well as explore the perceptions and attitudes of their customers towards them and the Clinton Devon Estate brand.
Their objectives included identifying who their core customers were, what their perception of Victoria Sawmills were as well as exploring brand awareness of Victoria Sawmills, Clinton Devon Estates vs competitors and exploring purchase behaviour and existing customer satisfaction with Victoria Sawmills
Solution
We suggested a phased approach would be most appropriate and recommend that the client firstly looked to utilise their current customer database which comprised approximately 1500 records. We undertook database cleansing, de-duping and analysis to ensure that all information was correct to maximise the resource available to understand more about the customer base. This also ensured a ‘clean’ database for future marketing use.
The second phase of the project involved completing both face to face and telephone depths, with “core customers” identified from the initial database analysis, to explore and understand their perceptions and awareness of the brand as well as looking how Victoria Sawmills compared to its competitors. Within this we also explored customer service perceptions which aided the construction of a new satisfaction questionnaire for monitoring KPI’s in the future.
Outcome
Following the completion of both phases of research the client was able to develop it marketing strategy and tactical activity to focus on key segments of its market and raise awareness of the brand and also correct a number of operational pricing issues and improve its competitive positioning.