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The average Canadian is a married, English-speaking, 40-year-old woman. She has at least some post-secondary education, and is at least the third generation of her family to be born here, probably in the province where she resides. She and her husband are both employed, making around $40,000 each. They have 1.5 children.
Reading the above description, you probably know exactly what kind of flooring choices to offer this woman. If you don’t, finding out shouldn’t be hard: just open any publication dealing with interior design and look at the products offered in the advertisements. Nine out of 10 of them will be aimed directly at this demographic.
Herein lies the problem. Each magazine, and each contractor’s mailbox, is stuffed with promotions from companies trying to grab the lion’s share of this huge, easily identified, easily located, middle section of the flooring market. There’s no question; that is where most of the money is. But with a legion of companies all trying to divide up the same pie, how do you manage to get more than a crust? And how do you manage to grab even that much without spending exorbitant amounts of time and money on advertising and sales?
Take a look around
While the above description fits the statistically average Canadian, we can easily observe simply by walking down the street that many, many people do not fit this profile. From this observation, we can reasonably deduce that middle-of-the-road offerings are missing the mark with large sections of the Canadian population. Of course, these people are still buying flooring, but they are ripe for the picking if someone can come to market with an approach or product that is more to their tastes.
One advantage that you, as a Canadian flooring supplier, have over large importers is that you are here and they are far away. You can take that walk down the street and get a sense of who is living in what neighbourhood. Leveraging that in-depth knowledge of your local market could reap some big benefits for your business. If you want to take a more scientific approach, the Statistics Canada (www.statcan.ca) website has a wealth of information about different communities and demographic trends.
They aren’t all living at home
One interesting revelation from StatsCan is that people under 39 are much more likely to own their own home if they live in a rural area or a small town, compared to those who live in an urban centre. Of those who are out of their parent’s house, three-quarters said that owning their own home was important to them.
This might mean there’s a market for hipper, more modern-looking flooring in rural areas, where marketers have traditionally insisted that only safe, classic colours will be accepted. Some lighter tones and some unusual species of hardwood, like aspen or sugar maple, might get a young couple excited after they’ve spent all day looking at row after row of red oak and broadleaf maple. Such child-friendly solutions as puzzle-shaped or character-imprinted flooring might be more appealing in these areas than you would think, given the older overall demographic in rural areas.
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