 And then I think that's something that we need to acknowledge that the store is important. It's going to continue to be important. But it's how do we utilize that in-store experience? How do we utilize brick and mortar to support everything else that's going on with digital? Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Popingloff, and we've got a great show lined up for you today. We're going to be breaking down for you data that we recently shared on a webinar that we co-hosted with the Foreign's Worth Group, with some market research that we conducted together about what's happening in the building product space, specifically DIYers, contractors, and pros. What shifts have happened because of COVID? You can grab any of the data that we talk about today, any of the webinars. You can make sure you go to venue.com slash audiences. It's going to help you in any kind of marketing or strategic planning. But with that, Beth, who do we have on the show with us today? We have potentially our favorite guest. We are really excited to have Grant Farnsworth back with us. He is president of the Farnsworth Group. They are one of our very trusted partners. Really excited to have you here, Grant. Thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me again. Clearly, I've got some more work to be done. On my part, I'm potentially the favorite. Yeah, potentially. We like to hedge. It's always a moving list, so you've got to make sure you can send gifts and whatever you want. We can be bought. If you'd like to get to that number one spot, I can send you some things that have been sitting on my Amazon wish list for a while. Always good to chat with you guys, so thanks for having us back. Grant, just in case any of our listeners are not familiar with your work at this point, why don't you do a little intro and then we can jump into the things we talked about in the webinar. Yeah, so the Farnsworth Group is a custom market research firm who gets deeper insights on your customer, your brand, your product, and your specific market to help you develop strategies, whether it's product strategies, overall acquisition strategies, customer strategies, whatever the case may be. We are the leading primary research firm for the Building Products Home Improvement Law and Branch space. Any questions about getting a deeper insight to your customer, your brand or product, we'd be happy to help have those conversations and develop a scope for work for you. Awesome. So to give everyone a little insight, in case you missed the webinar last week, in October, November 2020, guys, we introduced the 2021 Building Products Customer Guide, so the Farnsworth Group in Benvio. We surveyed almost 2,000 contractors, builders, architects, designers, engineers, installers, DIYers to talk about what's changed, how the pandemic has influenced their behavior, and not just in the immediate but what they expect from manufacturers and building product suppliers and retailers in 2021 and beyond. So we did a huge webinar on that in October, but the main feedback we got and what we really wanted to dig into was like, okay, let's go deeper into the specific audiences, and that's what we just talked about last week. So we did a deep dive into architects and designers, into builders as an individual group, into contractors as an individual group, and into DIYers as an individual group. And that's what we're going to chat about a bit today. It's just what were the highlights? How are people talking and receiving the information that we talked about? And really, what are some of those standouts for Zach and Grant and me that we wanted to make sure anybody who didn't get to participate in the webinar at least had these like a couple of high level pieces on their radar? Not to mention there's some really cool infographics, right? Not to mention those really good looking infographics. Beth, if I could put you in the spot, what was your biggest takeaway? Like if you're looking at the data, you know, with architects, contractors, DIYers, whatever it might be, is there anything that really stands out to you? Yeah, I think the number one, so we're obviously going to talk a lot about online and the importance of online from last year. But I think the main thing that I've actually heard Grant say is like, it's no longer e-commerce, it's now just commerce. And as we're starting to see things open up and as we return to at least being able to get out of our houses, the need for really like complete seamless messaging. What you're saying on the aisle has to match what I'm seeing on your website and what you're seeing to me on social media has to match what's in your ads and in your email and in your newsletter and in your flyers, that that is so blended and we've been talking about that for years. But it feels like, okay, now since I was really pushed back online, but I'm really excited to be able to go back into the store now, that seamlessness is more important than ever. Because as Zach, as you like to say, if you confuse them, you lose them. But that's no longer just on your homepage if it's confusing. Now it's, I might be standing in the aisle checking reviews on your website and I need all of those boxes to be ticking all alongside each other. You can't take for granted the individual ways that people might be looking into you. I love that. Grant, what about you? Yeah, well, I think with that, the return to end stores is certainly there. And I think what's critical on our side is that the brick and mortar isn't dead. And despite us maybe talking a lot about digital and the growth of digital and the acceleration, the store isn't dead. It's just the role that the store now plays. And I think that's something that we need to acknowledge that the store is important. What's going to continue to be important. But it's how do we utilize that in-store experience? How do we utilize brick and mortar to support everything else that's going on with digital? So I think, Beth has fought on and we haven't seen a decline in online purchasing, a decline in digital as we've seen a return to in-store. So I think constantly as we talked about last week and as we always hear from clients, what's going to stick? Right. And so far, these digital behaviors are sticking. Yep, the store is still important. And yes, a lot of that has come back. But that online piece is still there. So I think that was really important. And as far as, Zach, your question on what was one of the most surprising things, for me, it was the amount of brand shift amongst pros. And it was most amongst the architects. It was pretty high with commercial contractors. It was moderately high with builders, lower for GCs and remodelers. But overall to have anywhere between 25 and 35% of pros try a new brand of a building product that they had never touched before. That's a pretty big slap in the face from a group that is pretty steadfast in what they buy, how they buy, where they buy, what they do. So again, I think that's woken up a lot of people in our industry. And one of the things that is certainly driving that is, that the word he alluded to is the acceleration of digital. But I think as we were talking last week and have been for the last several months, the theme of availability is really connected throughout, whether we're talking about channel behaviors, brand behaviors, online behaviors, the supply chain issue isn't going away anytime soon. And it's already had a dramatic impact on what people are buying, where they're buying it. Well, it's not just supply of the products, it's also supply of the labor. You think about it, like, if you're a homeowner, you want to get a remodel done. I was talking to a buddy of mine. He's like, yeah, I'm scheduling my remodel for 2022. I was like, what? Scheduling for next year. He's like, oh, yeah, the remodeler is booked out through the end of the year. And so if I look at DIY, which I think is really interesting, and I was asking before the show grant, like how many of the companies you work with focus on DIY and Pro, and you're like, what, roughly half, right? Half and half. What's interesting is if you look at the last recession, 2007-2008, people got into DIY because of pricing. People got into it in this pandemic because they don't want to see people, they're concerned, and they just had time on their hands. They couldn't go out, they couldn't go to vacations, so they took on projects. So it's very different. And so one of the questions I have for you, and I know we didn't really necessarily cover this too much in the webinar, but what do you think the future of DIY is? Do you think that more people are going to be DIYing? Or do you think we're going to see this continue to see a little bit of a decline in the percentage of Americans that do DIY? Great question. We know historically, and the foreign group has been studying this industry for over 30 years now, and we know classically, historically, the younger generation, the more DIY they're going to be doing, the more first-time home buyers, the more DIY activity we see. So I think from that standpoint, when you look at the fundamentals of the industry, when you look at population demographics, when you look at demand, etc., we've got a lot of first-time home buyers, relatively new home buyers, maybe second home buyers that are coming on board. So I think the population, the group of people there to do DIY work is still going to remain solid. They're going to be getting into homes for the first time wanting to touch up this, that, and the other paint the walls where the case may be. So I don't believe, and our firm doesn't believe, that this DIYer is going away. And I think for a long time, we were talking about Gen Y as kind of the death of DIY. They don't want to do anything themselves. They're going to hire it all out, and that hasn't proven to be the case at all. What I think we may see though, Zach, is maybe a leveling off of some DIY activity over COVID. So 2020 was insanely good for DIY activity because you mentioned that people were home, they had the time, they didn't want people in their homes, disposable income shifted greatly. So I'm not going out, I'm not traveling, I've got this money. I can spend it on my home, I have nothing else to spend it on. So I think as we, quote, return to normal, which is a terrible thing to say, but as we feel more comfortable and we go out and go back to experiences and entertainment, et cetera, that disposable income is going to shift. So I think we'll level off on DIY. I also think a lot of work is pent up on the contractor side. So there were things that I've been wanting to do for the last 12 to 18 months that I didn't do. Because again, I didn't want somebody in my home. I wasn't sure where the economy was going to go. I wasn't sure about that. Well, now I'm feeling uncomfortable and by the way, the equity in my home is twice as much of what I expected it to be at this point. If I want something different, if I want a new layout of a home, I can't go find a house to buy because there's no inventory. So again, we look to Fundamentals Act to really help us understand what's going to drive whether it's DIY activity, contractor activity, et cetera. And the fundamentals are there to speak to the fact that there is going to be DIY activity because of house buying activity. But there's also going to be a lot of contractor activity. Again, because of Fundamentals, equity in the home, lack of inventory, et cetera. So we're seeing bigger projects come online from contractors than we have in the last few years. We're seeing better closure rates with contractors. We're seeing more project requests come in over these last few months than early last year. So I think things are trending in the right direction, certainly on the contractor side. Long-winded answers to say DIY I think is probably going to be level off here a little bit. Yeah, it's interesting. I gave a pretty close balls on Google Trends specifically, what's happening on Google when it comes to DIY projects versus specific building product categories. And I was doing some research over the weekend. And we saw this pretty nice bump of how to do X, Y, and Z in the home, or how to do this during COVID. Really nice bump. And like you said, it's leveled out a little bit. What's interesting though is we saw this very similar bump in COVID on how to buy certain products online in COVID. We saw this really nice uptick. What's interesting is that has actually stayed pretty consistent on Google. So although activity for DIY projects may have leveled out, the increase in online activity of how to get a hold of products and purchase them online, that acceptance rate and the likelihood that someone might be willing to buy that online is just escalated. I think we mentioned maybe in the webinar about that TechCrunch article where there's I think the acceleration of e-commerce grew five years and five months. And that's true for building products too. It's like the idea of how do I get products online or even begin that research process where I may have done it a different way, may have talked to somebody. People are going online even more. And are you all seeing Trends by category? So Beth, I wonder as we think about seasonally lawn and garden right now, I'm assuming you're seeing some metrics that are seeing that spike. Are you seeing a shift to in other product categories that has maybe fallen off from COVID or has stayed level or even increased since this pandemic started a year ago? So we're right at the beginning peak of when lawn garden starts to pick up. I was actually looking at that information this past weekend and it looks like it's going to be very, very strong. Like that's just a leading indicator on Google. Like if you look at what happened, literally it's like March 15th is when things really started to shut down last year and you saw this dip. It was literally like a dip and then like a massive spike. We're not seeing a dip, but I don't see people spending less money outside. If anything, they're going to spend more. Well, I actually was going to ask you that, Grant, if you're seeing that because I think as we've been talking about, you know, we're talking about the building materials customer, not just like what's changed because that's not helpful, but like what's staying the same from what's changed. And I think it's similar from a homeowner standpoint. It's there's this shift that you can feel that's like my priorities now and in the future have changed. And you see it in how KB Homes is going after home designs, that home design plans from one of the largest builders and the nation has shifted as a result. That tells you they're not really known for like quick right turns. Like they are shifting because there is a stayed demand for I'm now going to just spend more time in my house because I have spent more time in my house over the last two years. So I'm going to invest because that habit isn't going to change. We were like talking recently like no one's just bum rushing grocery stores right now because things are starting to open up. Now I started to get my groceries delivered and it turns out that that's incredible. So I'm just going to keep doing that. And there's there's some other pieces as well along the same lines and just interested if you guys are seeing something similar. I mean just look at this practically if you're manufacturing anything that's an outdoor space. Let's say you're selling decking or pavers or pergolas for that matter. Do you think you're like I don't know if we should like run at full capacity after 2020. You're probably like all in just pushing. I mean you have to you should be you should be. I mean if you look at Google yes indicators look very strong but after what went through last year of course you would right. We were talking with the fastener company and we often will you know meet with like contractors to get some feedback or audience feedback on specific products and they were like yeah we'd love for you to talk to our customer but you can't can't get them on the phone like they're not available. We like maybe in December when it's snowing outside like those things will slow down but like they can't talk to you don't even try. Beth your question on stickiness or what you know what what's what's I think that's a really appropriate question because we've been talking a lot in our company about imprint and this idea of how we look at the home is going to stick. I mean we've maybe almost I don't want to say forever change like how we look at the home but you've referenced you know Lunar and KB and you know those big builders of the world already shifting their design trends. I think we're seeing that translate to you know DIY projects I think we're seeing that translate to contractor projects as well. We are still doing our COVID home improvement tracker we're looking at DIY activities and contractor activities and I know it's not about you know the building products customer guide but in that COVID tracker we are actually seeing increased DIY activity in March this year compared to March last year and in fact if you look at the retail sales data for home improvements hardware lawn and garden January and February are up year over year and we're actually going into March with metrics that would indicate March is actually going to be better than last year. So this stuff I mean like I think we all keep waiting we just had a webinar with another group about this topic and I feel like the industry is just waiting for DIY to fall off a cliff that there's no way that homeowners can continue to do work on their home. While contractors are getting more and more projects there's no way both can do work in tandem but we haven't seen it yet like this idea that everyone's going to like in a mad rush just go fly off to Disneyland or go travel and eat out of restaurants and just spend all their cash on things they couldn't do for the past year it just hasn't happened yet it's just hasn't. Well you said it in the beginning grant of you know like Gen Y millennials were talked about as like the death of DIY and from since I've started like really being a part of the building materials industry like 2012-2013 that's all I've been hearing about like when we would talk about DIYers everyone's like yeah but they're like fly by night they were like this little like minuscule part of the building products they're like this isn't gonna last and HGTV was like oh no pretty sure it is like we're we're good here. And it's just beat like the lines have just blurred I feel like DIYers just double down and they're like uh not only am I not going to go anywhere I'd also like your installation guide on steel siding please. Well there's an interesting article that came out a couple weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal about this I think the title of it was something like here I'm actually going to pull it up says Home Depot and Lowe's shouldn't fear pandemics end you know because they had such a strong year and I mean both of them are pretty good indicator of the pro and the DIYer and the basic premise of it is you know Wall Street's a little concerned are they going to you know have as strong of a year as what they had in 2020 and the data says that they had their best January ever. Now Graham we're in a little bit of a lockdown but they're still seeing very strong revenue and and on top of that think about how much infrastructure they built into their business during that time too whether that's faster checkout or streamlined ordering all of these things make it easier to buy which we all know translates to more revenue. That I've heard you know you and Beth and the Venvio team talk about frictionless and you know Beth you use the analogy of grocery and and you may never go into a grocery store again because you found a more frictionless process a lot of us have had that same experience with with building materials and home improvement products and how we go about getting them and so yeah I mean I don't think this is the end you look at those sales data I mean you look at those numbers and you look at the intent that we're seeing on our tracker you look at how people are going about the projects they're doing it's I mean at least for the next few months it looks to be holding pretty solid. I think it's an interesting point to bring back the conversation around channel conflict because we all have heard a lot we always hear a lot about that and we're hearing a lot about it we're just frankly a lot of questions when we talk about how big online was last year and I think we've always said rising tide lifts all ships that's kind of been a bit of our mantra of like yeah it makes people uncomfortable I actually was just talking to somebody the other day was like looking for a bathtub used Kohler's website to find exactly what they want they're like mega pumped about it it's a homeowner mega pumped about the gorgeous soaking tub that they found from Kohler but then they bought it from Home Depot because they're like it was like $200 cheaper on Home Depot I'm like yeah that's by design by the way they did that so that Home Depot doesn't get pissed that they have an e-comp experience I didn't say that but anyway but I think it's no longer going to be rising tides lift all ships it's like if I'm not available everywhere wherever the consumer happens to be in that moment I also won't be a good product for you to stock on your shelves because no one's going to buy me there either you are going to see like drop off in sales of my product from your shelf because my product isn't available on e-comp yeah those are going to become the facts you're missing out on brand loyalty opportunities you're missing out on long lifetime conversion opportunities it's this if omni channel which is like very fancy but if like seamlessness from in-store online in your ads in your print in your trade show booth if that expectation from a messaging standpoint is increased also the expectation that I'm going to buy it like you've got an app you're in retail you're in a dealer wherever I am that's where you are selling it and that's what I want you have to be you have to be the customer whether it's what and now what's interesting is it's it's not just the di wire meeting them where they're at when they're at where they want it how they want it is the contractor as well and I think there's a really interesting power shift that could be happening right now what we've seen happen for the last you know two decades is that depot and lows really took power away from manufacturers right I mean if they were calling the shots and to a certain extent they were controlling the power when it came to the customer you're going to buy what we have when we have it what else are you going to do now what we're seeing is the customer is starting to take power they've got the ability to go to 50 different things and learn and educate and and figure out what they want where they want it and they're going to get it from whoever delivers it best to them so now all of a sudden I think the retail space the pro channel space as well as the manufacturers are now having to figure out a way to come together share some power so that they can meet these customers in a way that they want it and I think this is going to be and can be a really really good thing for our industry and Beth you're spot on this this discussion around channel conflict is going to solve that so if manufacturers and suppliers can figure out a way to work together and and what I think it's about is functional execution so we now need to understand okay the brand can do a bnc the channel can do x y and z let's all lean on each other for what we can execute really really well so that by the end the consumer stays with our little flywheel that we've built right we have every outlet covered we have every content piece covered because we have to be in all these places so I think there's a real tremendous opportunity we've been so scared historically with channel conflict but I think this is a huge opportunity and almost a requirement that we have to face it now and figure it out that's like a mic drop situation yeah it's great would you guys agree with that like but so kind of percent but what are you hearing from a standpoint of who's winning right now in in that channel conflict discussion what what strategies what tactics are you seeing when are we still too early to understand what doesn't doesn't work when I want to be in all places while not upsetting each of those suppliers well I think there's a couple of things you see that are happening that there's not a clear winner yet like if look what's happening outside of building products for a second massive growth in like delivery I can be on my phone and I get what I want immediately this hasn't really taken now there's in some markets you see it some people startups even Home Depot is trying to get to this place but there's not a clear winner when it comes to getting products on the job site or to my house like if I think food I think DoorDash like they were like the clear winner from the pandemic if I need a car tomorrow it's Carvana yeah right if I want to buy something e-commerce it's Amazon all of those conveniences is the you know the clear thing that people want if I want building products you'll notice that there's a lot of people investing in that VC money big money big tech trying to get to that space I think that is where you'll see I mean look back on this episode 12 18 24 months from now we oh this company won somebody's going to win that I don't know who it's going to be still a little bit fragmented than you think right now I mean from what we've seen and what we've heard there's a couple players out there trying to win this and not I know this it wasn't really in our webinar but there's a couple of players who are trying to win this who are going to invest heavily into this to be the go-to source for both pro and homeowner yeah and I think that will be probably the biggest thing we see that that came out is going oh well this is like the clear winner one of two things will probably happen it's going to be somebody an upstart that like really takes off and then like Home Depot or Lowe's buys them or Home Depot or Lowe's is going to do it yeah and they're going to win it's going to be one of those two things how important are you seeing the discussion around brand and truly creating brand for our industry or just which is something that historically maybe you know our industry doesn't do doesn't do very well with the exception of maybe a few categories but how do you see the role and importance of establishing brand in our industry kind of all across all categories taking hold over the next few years well I think it's a fresh start for everybody whether you want it or not the reason being is that everything people want today it's very different than it was 12 months ago maybe similar in some regards but you're basically starting over and so if you want to win if you want to be the brand of choice it's no longer just about your product it's about the promise around your product that's going to define you what I mean by that it's service it's ease it's support it's the experience and then the product is kind of at the center of that but manufacturers for so long have relied on hey look at our features features are great if you have availability today versus if you don't like what are people going to buy I need the product today that is a thing around your product that's going to determine whether or not people buy it so I think brand is incredibly important but if the brand is no longer just the features of the product and the product itself it's everything else around your product the technology service experience etc that's defining what brand is today for an industry that up to this point really hasn't had to think about that that's I think a really good point and that's in line with you know what we what we see in a lot of the research that we do for our clients we think about that traditional value prop oh yeah price is still important price is important quality is still important but those have become it seems table stakes and the research that we do for trade and for for DIYers so it's now Zach you know kind of that third element you know your value proposition now has to incorporate some other elements whether it's service or support or whatever the case may be like that's now got to be baked in beyond just quality and price well there's there's whole companies that that is their entire value proposition yeah instacart I go on my phone I get the oysters I want and they're delivered to my doorstep yeah their product is is a service and they scaled it you know and so I think that's the shift we have to make mentally you know great point but grand this has been awesome thank you so much for coming on the show yeah I know we probably went six ways from Sunday outside of the building products customer guide but there's a lot of exciting things happening in our industry right now and I think a lot of topics that that are going to be relevant for the next you know two or three years that are important for us to to help our clients with absolutely agreeing and again for our listeners if you want to get a hold of these data infographics that we mentioned in the show go to vanvio.com slash audience you can also get access to that webinar we just completed it's great information at your fingertips great if someone wants to get in touch with you what's the best way for them to do that yeah they can visit the farmswithgroup.com they can email our team at results at the farmswithgroup.com feel free to reach out to me directly or or any one of my colleagues and always happy to have a conversation perfect again for our listeners make sure you go to vanvio.com slash podcast to subscribe until next time I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Popney Glove thanks everybody