A building-materials manufacturer gets creative with its product samples and expands its market in the process

By: Vicki Powers

How do you move your company into a totally different market? It helps if you can identify the pain points of your new prospective buyers, and then graphically demonstrate how you can remove that pain. And if you can do it with a sample of your own product, well, even better.

That’s the approach that BuildDirect took when it mailed out a “dimensional” maze on its bamboo flooring product to illustrate both its product and its non-traditional approach.

Historically, BuildDirect’s business-to-consumer (B2C) market represented a purely online effort — mostly search marketing and paid affiliates. The organization figured that prospects in the B2B market were less likely to be online actually searching for building supplies. So BuildDirect, a Canadian company typically serving the do-it-yourself audience, relied on a clever direct mail campaign to attract the business-to-business (B2B) market comprising flooring distributors who resell to retailers and large builders.

“In their world, they have folks approaching them through trade shows and salesmen on the road,” says Rob Davidson, vice president of marketing at BuildDirect. “That’s not consistent with our online business model, so we thought direct mail would be a good way to reach out to these prospective commercial buyers.”

As a result, BuildDirect’s direct mail maze campaign was one part of a more comprehensive campaign packaged in a box as a dimensional mailer to 350 presidents/CEOs at flooring-distribution companies. (Another tier of 5,000 smaller companies received a flat mail piece.) The wooden maze actually consisted of two mazes, side by side. The traditional maze on the left represented the plethora of twists and turns that customers needed to navigate when sourcing through a traditional channel. Flooring materials often come from overseas, which involves foreign currency issues, excise taxes, customs and tariffs, so the maze included such landmarks as “lost at sea,” “damaged goods,” and “missing paperwork.”

The contrasting “maze” wasn’t labyrinthine at all, but rather featured a straight track along which the ball moved simply up and down. This was meant as a visual metaphor of how BuildDirect was taking a lot of the hassles and costs out of the buying process for these commercial buyers. “If you source through BuildDirect, it is basically one call to BuildDirect and a straight line to distribution,”
Davidson says. “As a subtle point, we put the whole thing on our bamboo flooring, one of the products we sell.”

The maze campaign garnered a 16-percent response rate through reply cards, e-mail and even phone calls. Davidson says they were pleasantly surprised with these results as a non-traditional player in a traditional industry, and that the piece really stuck in the minds of recipients. “People at trade shows continue to comment, ‘You’re the guys that sent the maze,’” he says.