ProQuo sits down with: Safestyle

Safestyle UK are shaking up the world of double glazing and have been successfully matching homeowners with affordable, high quality, energy efficient windows and doors since their creation in 1992. The brand is showing no sign of slowing down, and not only do they occupy the largest stake in the market, but they’ve also increased their share price and diversified their business this year, expanding their presence across the entirety of the UK.

Embracing future-facing, sophisticated marketing tools has propelled the brand ahead of competitors. With ProQuo’s help, Safestyle are carving out a space for their brand, differentiating themselves within a crowded market through focusing on unmet consumer needs in their category.

We sat down with Safestyle to hear all about their new brand strategy. Don’t miss the exclusive interview between ProQuo’s Content Writer, Ruby Arenson and Safestyle’s Marketing Director, Martin Troughton, where we delve into Safestyle’s unique brand positioning, and find out more about their upcoming campaign.

ProQuo: Hi Martin, I’m so interested to hear about Safestyle. You guys are unstoppable at the moment! I’d love to hear about the challenges your brand is currently facing.

Safestyle: Hi Ruby! Every business comes with its own set of unique struggles. Ours revolves around the reputation of our category and the nature of our products.

There’s still quite a negative perception of double glazing. Many people associate it with the silver-tongued salesman, that used to wheedle people out of their money. We’re working hard to overcome this stigma, by innovating the category and our offering, and in doing so we hope to alter the way the public perceives us. Another challenge we’re facing is that our items are infrequent purchases, that may only be bought 2-3 times in a person’s lifetime. So, of course, the purchases come with a lot of anxiety, and this means we’re helping buyers who are inexperienced. This is further exacerbated through the price of our items, which are high ticket purchases, even as the value player in the market.

This year, we’ve been fortunate as the market has been buoyant due to the pandemic. As people have had to stay at home this year, they’ve saved more money than usual and therefore had more to invest in their homes.

ProQuo: I’m glad to hear! And could you tell me more about Safestyle’s mission?

Safestyle: Of course. We’re the largest double-glazing company in the UK but only the 3rd most famous. We’re working on our awareness, as we’re still associated with an old, outdated ad campaign we ran on TV, which had a man shouting on screen, “You buy one, you get one free.” It had great cut through and memorability but didn’t represent our brand particularly well and established us in the ‘value’ position. So, we are looking to update this.

With ProQuo, we’re looking to establish where we are, what our benchmarks are and which 16 Drivers we can use to differentiate ourselves within the market. Our market is exceptionally crowded as in addition to larger, more-established competitors, we’re also up against hundreds of smaller locally owned businesses. This is why we want to use the 16 Drivers, so we can clearly own a space in the category and set ourselves apart from the competition.

ProQuo: That’s great! Could you tell me more about your current brand strategy?

Safestyle: We’ve taken our ProQuo Scores for the 16 Drivers, mapped them out, compared them to our competition, and set targets against them. These targets are based around our advertising objectives and the outcome is to differentiate our brand offering within our category.

Unsurprisingly enough, we’ve decided to cement our value position, as the ProQuo platform has shown us how important the Value For Money Driver is to our consumers. Another Driver we’re targeting is Integrity. It’s a factor that’s important in our category and is something we’re actively working on because of the stigma of double glazing. To improve our Integrity, all of our sales reps, over the last 3 months, have undergone training and they are now all qualified under the Association of Professional Selling.

ProQuo: And would you say ProQuo has helped you to grow your brand?

Safestyle: ProQuo has forced us to decide on what we want to own in the minds of our consumers and has given us a better way of measuring this. We love how ProQuo enables us to see trends in our category and it’s definitely reflective of how people really think and feel about our business. At the moment we’re using the platform to align our behaviors as a business with our activities. That’s why we decided to pursue ethical sales as we saw how important Integrity was to our consumers.

We’re excited to use ProQuo’s real-time analysis to guide our upcoming campaign. We’ll be tracking our movements through our ProQuo Scores and will be using these scores as part of our briefing documents to internal and external agencies. We can’t believe how clear both our mission and goals are now, and that’s all down to ProQuo!

ProQuo: That’s so good to hear. I was also wondering what methods you used previously before you found ProQuo?

Safestyle: The methods we used to use were backwards-looking and not dynamic at all! Like Omnibus surveys or dipping into the market on large scale but only once or twice a year. There’s no way you could track individual attributes through these methods. The advantage of ProQuo is the much better, more responsive, more dynamic way of looking at an event to see how it’s tracking. What we’re getting out of ProQuo is a deeper understanding of the market, that will help us to drive growth and achieve our core objective, of gaining market share.