The building products industry is encountering significant headwinds. Economic forecasts point to a flattening market in 2025, driven by labor shortages, rising material costs, and high interest rates. In this environment, manufacturers face a critical imperative: develop a robust market share strategy or risk stagnation.

To succeed, manufacturers must take a data-driven approach that identifies opportunities, addresses unmet needs, and differentiates their brand to gain market share. While the roadmap is clear, the path to accomplishing this requires nuanced understanding and strategic precision that only comes from comprehensive market research.

What Companies Need to Know to Set Their Strategy

Understanding the Size of the Prize

Unlike CPG brands, market sizing in the building products industry is complex. The fragmented nature of the industry—comprised of independent retailers, direct distributors, specialty suppliers, and major home centers that don’t share sales data—makes visibility into market size and share difficult. However, this data is critical for manufacturers looking to capitalize on the biggest opportunities.

This is where custom market research comes in. By combining internal sales data, secondary sources, and primary research with buyers and/or sellers, we can paint a comprehensive picture of the market. This includes:

• Market sizing and channel segmentation: Identifying the total addressable market for specific product categories and mapping the flow of products from manufacturer to end-user, highlighting key players.
• Brand share: Analyzing the strength of category players and their market share.

Mapping Category Users, Needs, and Unmet Needs

As markets flatten, customer priorities shift dramatically. Homeowners make different tradeoffs, and professionals adapt their practices to new constraints.

The "jobs to be done" framework becomes especially valuable here. What specific problems are customers trying to solve? Under financial pressure, homeowners will make tradeoffs between renovation and repair projects, creating competition across categories—not just within them. Similarly, professionals facing labor shortages are developing new criteria for product selection. Does it require fewer people on the job site? Can less skilled workers install it effectively? Does it reduce total installation time? Does it minimize callbacks or warranty issues?

Understanding these evolving needs requires both qualitative and quantitative research:

• Qualitative research uncovers the nuances, tradeoffs, and emerging solutions.
• Quantitative research defines unique segments and priorities to guide resource allocation.

Validated methods such as Usage & Attitudes studies, Path to Purchase research, and Segmentation modeling are often used to fully understand customers and their interactions and preferences in the category. Only by mapping the full landscape of customer needs—and identifying where gaps exist—can manufacturers position themselves to capture additional share.

Assessing Your Brand's Position

With a clear understanding of the market and customer needs, it's time to turn inwards. Where does your brand stand? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do customers perceive your products and your brand?

For manufacturers with diverse product portfolios (as many building products companies continue to expand with numerous mergers and acquisitions), it is critical to analyze your product portfolio within the context of jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) and identify gaps, opportunities, and potential areas of overlap or cannibalization. This can be done through simple line optimization research, or through development of a more complex JTBD Needs Framework. This analysis often identifies opportunities for portfolio optimization, whether through new product development, line extensions, or consolidation of underperforming products. Qualitative research is used to uncover unique positioning for each brand that properly matches its space in the framework.

Brand health tracking provides the complementary perspective on your market position. By measuring awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty metrics against competitors over time, you can identify strengths to leverage and weaknesses to address in your market share strategy.

Optimizing Products and Marketing Strategy

With a clear understanding of market opportunities, customer needs, and your current position, you can develop targeted initiatives to capture additional share. These typically fall into two categories:

Product Optimization

Product development, feature enhancements, and line extensions must be tightly aligned with identified customer needs. Concept testing—both qualitative and quantitative—ensures these investments will deliver the anticipated returns.

Depending on the scope of innovation, you may need:

• Iterative concept testing to refine ideas
• Feature optimization studies to determine the ideal configuration of benefits within a product offering
• Price sensitivity analysis to maximize margin without sacrificing share
• Product usage testing to confirm performance in real-world conditions

Marketing Optimization

Even the best products won't drive share growth without effective communications. Your research should inform both messaging content and channel strategy:

• Benefits testing to determine which resonate most strongly with each customer segment
• Competitive claims prioritization to determine which will be most compelling and defensible
• Loyalty program optimization to maximize pro loyalty and brand system (vs. component) adoption

Previous segmentation research proves invaluable here, allowing you to tailor messages to specific customer types rather than relying on generic appeals.

The Cycle of Success

Maximizing market share is an ongoing process. It requires a deep understanding of the market, customer needs, and competitive dynamics, and the ability to customize your learning plan based on market changes and research outcomes.

Take Steps to Increase Your Market Share

The Farnsworth Group brings over 300 years of collective experience in the building products industry to this challenge. Our specialized knowledge helps manufacturers and retailers correctly interpret market data and develop strategies that reflect the unique dynamics of the building products sector.

Whether you're beginning your market share journey or looking to refine an existing strategy, our team can provide the insights you need to grow—even when the overall market doesn’t.

In a flat market, knowledge is power. Let us help you gain the insights you need to win. 

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By Karen Barnes, Senior Research Advisor

Through her expertise in brand consulting, market research design, and advanced analytics, Karen has been helping answer critical business questions for the past 15 years. She has had the privilege of working with many of the top global insights organizations and applying best practices across a myriad of clients in CPG, technology, finance, healthcare, and of course home improvement, including developers, building products manufacturers, and retailers.

Meet the rest of The Farnsworth Group team >>

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