Building products manufacturers who struggle with marketing are usually not bad at marketing. They are running a version of it that works fine in software, in professional services, and in most of B2B, against a market that does not behave like any of those.
The category is different in one specific way, and every downstream frustration follows from it.
Building products manufacturers, and the HVAC, plumbing and electrical makers who also sell through contractors, struggle with marketing because the contractor choosing their product already trusts a brand, and that trust was formed during training rather than during evaluation. Marketing built to inform a buyer who is deciding does not work on a buyer who decided a decade ago. The competition is not another company’s campaign. It is a preference that predates you and gets confirmed every time the incumbent product works.
Quick Take
Because the buyer is not in an evaluation, and most marketing assumes they are.
Standard B2B marketing runs on a reasonable premise: someone has a problem, they are researching solutions, and the company that shows up with the most useful information at the right moment earns consideration. That premise holds in categories where buyers reconsider regularly.
Contractors do not reconsider regularly. The brand was learned during training and confirmed by years of use that never let them down, so there is no evaluation to insert yourself into.
Three consequences follow, and together they describe why manufacturer marketing so often feels like it is not landing:
Information does not change a decision that was not made on information. Confidence was built through repetition, so a superior spec sheet is answering a question the buyer is not asking.
The decision-maker is not where your marketing is. The person whose preference decides the account is on a job site, and most manufacturer marketing is built to reach somebody at a desk. That is why so much of it never reaches the job site.
The sales cycle also hides the failure, because a manufacturer can miss the moment that mattered by two years and never know, because the product still sells through existing accounts and the shortfall shows up as a soft launch nobody can explain.
A lot of building products companies grew for decades on relationships, distribution, and trade shows. Marketing was never load-bearing, so it never got built. Those channels carried the company and earned every dollar they got. The limit they are hitting now is the channel’s limit, not the company’s.
No. One caveat before the internal side of this, because it decides what the fix looks like.
Word of mouth is not the weakness here, it is the strongest force in this market, and the problem is being absent from a conversation that is already deciding purchases. Telling a manufacturer their best channel is their weakness is wrong, and the manufacturers who have heard it before were right to stop listening. We made that whole argument in why contractors run the brands they were trained on, so this article takes it as given and moves to the part that is structural: what the business needs is more market gravity rather than more leads.
Structure more than budget, in our experience.
Marketing reports to sales. Common in this industry, and it produces a marketing function whose job is to support this quarter’s quota. Demand creation runs on a longer horizon than a quota does, so it loses every prioritization conversation it enters.
Nobody owns the contractor. The distributor owns the transaction, the rep owns the relationship, and the manufacturer owns the product. The person who decides has no owner inside the building, so no budget line has their name on it.
The success of the past is evidence against the change. A company that built forty years on relationships and shows has a well-documented case that this works, and it did. The counterargument is a forecast, and forecasts lose arguments against history.
Spending gets spread rather than concentrated. A little of everything, none of it funded to the point of producing a signal, which produces a year of activity and no evidence either way.
None of those are fixed by a bigger budget, which is why more marketing is rarely the answer for a manufacturer who feels stuck.
Two things, and they only work together.
One, structured customer feedback. Not a research program, a habit:
“Regular feedback from their customers. They have some sort of, I’ll say community, developed with their customers that encourages feedback on their products and what’s going on in those businesses, and in different geographies in the country, and seasonality. They’re meeting those contractors with the messaging that’s important to them.”
It is continuous rather than annual, so it tracks a market that changes. It covers geography and seasonality, because what matters to a contractor in Phoenix in July is not what matters to one in Minneapolis in January and a national campaign that ignores this is talking past most of its audience. And it includes secondhand sources, counting online research and product reviews as part of the same input. Voice of customer, gathered wherever it already exists rather than commissioned.
Two, the targeting data to act on it. First-party data good enough to segment those audiences, so the message written for a specific situation reaches the people in it. The summary is deliberately unglamorous:
“Deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. It’s like this fundamental marketing strategy that you always come back to. […] In reality, that’s still the blueprint for what people need to be doing when they’re running marketing.”
Feedback without targeting produces good messaging delivered to everyone, which dilutes into nothing. Targeting without feedback produces precise delivery of a message nobody needed. The manufacturers who get results have both, and neither half is a technology purchase.
The failure mode first, because it is the more recognizable one:
“The ones that are just trying to say, hey, we have this cool new product, without thinking about the application to the end user and having the marketing and messaging meet that, that’s where it just feels like they’re better off just burning that money than spending it online.”
Announcing a product is not marketing it. The announcement is about you, and the contractor is not in the market for news about your company; they are in the middle of a job with a specific problem. A campaign that connects the product to that problem is doing something, but one that only says the product exists is buying impressions from people with no reason to care.
What the working version looks like:
The pattern in the manufacturers who get this right is not budget and it is not tooling. Somebody decided the contractor was theirs to know, built the habit of asking, and kept the data current enough to act on the answers. Both halves are organizational decisions, and both are available to a company of any size this quarter.
Activity without preference means somebody else already has the trust. We will tell you who, and what it would take for it to be you.
Why do building products manufacturers struggle with marketing more than other B2B companies?
Because their buyer is not in an evaluation. Contractors form brand loyalty during training and confirm it through years of use, so there is no active research process for a manufacturer’s marketing to enter. Most B2B marketing assumes a buyer who is comparing options, and that assumption does not hold here.
What internal obstacles stop manufacturers from marketing well?
Marketing reporting to sales, so demand creation competes with quarterly quota and loses. Nobody inside the company owning the contractor, since the distributor owns the transaction and the rep owns the relationship. Decades of success through relationships and trade shows arguing against change. And budgets spread thin enough that nothing produces a clear signal.
What do manufacturers who market well have in common?
Structured, continuous customer feedback covering geography and seasonality, paired with first-party targeting data good enough to reach the segment each message was written for. Neither works alone: feedback without targeting dilutes, and targeting without feedback delivers a precise message nobody needed.
Why do new product launches underperform for manufacturers?
Usually because the launch announces the product without connecting it to the application the contractor cares about, and because it arrives into a market with no existing familiarity with the brand. Announcing a product is about the manufacturer; contractors are in the middle of a job with a specific problem.
How long does it take to change a contractor’s brand preference?
Longer than a campaign, because the preference was built over years of use and is confirmed every time the incumbent product works. It shifts when a peer the contractor trusts demonstrates equal or better quality, which is a slower and more durable process than advertising.
