Installer loyalty to boiler brands

[Ray Stafford]

A thread about Glowworm on the central heating forum just reminded me of some research that I did a few months ago.

I took a large batch of boiler sales data, and tried to work out how loyal installers were to a brand.

Firstly, I stripped out all the data that I knew related to specified boilers on sites etc, where the installer didnt have choice of brand.

Then I reduced the data again so that it only included installers who had bought at least 3 boilers of the same brand. That might not be all they bought, but I wanted to get rid of all the very small guys who only buy a handful of boilers.

Finally, I took each installer, and categorised them by how loyal they appeared to be to each brand.

Here's an example.

If a given customer bought 10 boilers, and they included 6 worcesters and 4 vaillants, they would be categorised as:

Worcester user, 60% loyal AND
Vaillant user, 40% loyal.

Here's the results by brand:

Vaillant - average 71.3% loyalty (so from my data, any customer who bought at least 3 vaillants, was likely to buy vaillant more than 7 times out of 10)
Worcester - average 70.7% loyalty
Main - average 64.1% loyalty
Glowworm - average 59.8% loyalty
Baxi - average 54.2% loyalty

At the time I did it, we hadn't been selling Ideal long enough to have sufficient data to make it worth analysing.

Not sure that it proves anything, but thought you might be interested.

 

[Rickster123]

It proves that you spend too much time behind your desk and not enough time behind the counter! Only joking mate! Interesting info. I think most of us are loyal to a manufacturer until we have an issue. One change to a boiler can be enough to put us off.

 

[Nostrum]

Says to me that vaillant customers are loyal, Worcester customers are stupid, and the rest just buy what's on offer at the time





Only joking to all you Worcester ******.

 

[Ray Stafford]

It proves that you spend too much time behind your desk and not enough time behind the counter!

Its warm in my office!

I think most of us are loyal to a manufacturer until we have an issue. One change to a boiler can be enough to put us off.

Funny you should say that. The data covered the period from late 2011 to mid 2012, which included Baxi's introduction of the GA range (which I think cost them dearly in terms of customer loyalty) and the Vaillant changes to their range.

We saw a big shift from Baxi to Main after the GA range came in. If it wasnt for the fact that we had a pile of the older Duotec 1 boilers, I think Baxi loyalty would have dropped even lower. Vaillant seemed to have managed their change much better.