The route to building a competitive advantage in the construction industry

Sarah Westwood, Creative Strategist, Our Design Agency, discusses how businesses in the construction industry can build a competitive advantage and encourages them to think about how customers are experiencing their brand in the real world.

These days it’s very tough to gain competitive advantage in the construction industry. Intense competition means that most brands are on a level playing field.

So, do you keep doing what you’ve always done? Or do you take a deep breath and ask bigger questions about how customers are experiencing your brand and, crucially, how you can improve that experience?

A new perspective

This broader view frees our minds. It helps us to challenge our assumptions and embrace new ways of thinking. For example, instead of clustering propositions for ‘target audiences’, we resolve to get closer to the individual customer experience.

Delving more deeply into customer experience means embarking on a journey with an open mind. Until you begin this journey you cannot be sure where it will take you. You dive into the rabbit hole, where you just might find a completely brilliant but unexpected truth.

Look at BUILT/, the start-up builders’ merchant from Travis Perkins Group, created for an emerging breed of builders who have adopted the progressive mind-set of the modern service industry. These builders seek to eliminate inefficiency. As they wait in a long queue at the builders’ merchant they’re not appreciating the point-of-sale materials telling them about in-store offers, they’re looking impatiently at their watches.

The solution from Travis Perkins is BUILT/ building supplies on demand, which values customers’ time as much as their money. Efficiency is evident through every customer interaction. In Lock and Load for example, customers order supplies online and drive up to the loading bay where a team, behaving more like a motor-racing pit crew, quickly loads up the goods to get the customer back on-site sooner.

BUILT/ is a brand that’s clearly thought hard about the customer experience. It offers a solution that creates real value for the customer and builds competitive advantage and brand preference. It drives revenues by retaining customers who are willing to pay extra and even become brand advocates.

In the age of social media, customers with a good experience tell nine people; those with a bad one tell 16. Getting it right first time has never been more important.

Time to begin the journey

Once you’ve taken the plunge and embraced this broader view, you begin to see every interaction you have with a brand in terms of the customer experience. And once you’ve taken this step, you’ll never see the world the same way.

Perhaps it’s time to start asking whether there’s an opportunity here for your brand. Are there ways you could improve your customer experience? Only you can decide.