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Canadian Paint Consumer Demographics
The target consumers for Sherwin-Williams are Do-it-yourselfers, professional painting
contractors, home builders, property maintenance, healthcare,
hospitality, architects, interior designers, industrial, marine, flooring and
original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and product finishers. Although we are able to provide demographic insights relating to the consumer segment called "Home Renovators," a segment that spend a large share of their purchase budget buying paints, we were unable to compile a clear demographic picture specifically of Canadian home paint buyers.
Useful Findings:
Sherwin-Williams
- In terms of locations that Sherwin Williams maintains, there are more than 225 stores in Canada with 48 in British Columbia, 28 in Alberta, 7 in Saskatchewan, 9 in Manitoba, 88 in Ontario, 37 in Quebec, 4 in New Brunswick, 2 in Newfoundland, 6 in Nova Scotia, and 1 in PEI.
- As reported in 2018, Sherwin Williams has a specific vision for Quebec that involves opening two to three stores in 2018 and five to six in 2019.
- While specifying target markets in terms of geographic areas, the company mentioned there target markets in Quebec as Plateau Hochelaga Côte Saint-LucParc Extension/Mile End AhuntsicCôte-des-NeigeVieux-LongueuilGriffintownVieux-RosemontVanier/Pierre-Bertrand Terrebonne Saint-Romuald/LevisHaute-Saint-Charles/ L'Ormière.
- Sherwin Williams introduced an app called colorsnap which was downloaded in more than 60 countries.
- The target demographic of this app included: home-owners, architects and designers and painting contractors. Moreover, a mobile app was chosen as the medium to reach out to consumers as, reportedly, the company was trying to each a younger demographic.
- In their annual report which also includes findings on the company's operations in Canada, the set of customers served included the following : Do-it-yourselfers, professional painting contractors, home builders, property maintenance, healthcare & hospitality professionals, architects, interior designers, industrial, marine, flooring and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) product finishers.
Behr:
- Consumers targeted by another paint company, Behr, included “do it yourself” and professional customers who were sold through home center retailers and other retailers.
Benjamin Moore:
- Relating to Benjamin Moore, aims at a target audience of "premium-quality paint users."
Home Paint Consumers in Canada and their Demographics:
According to a survey done by Houzze & Home — Canada for 2017 and 2018, the following insights were found:
- For Home Renovators, Planned Top Purchase in 2018 was Interior or Exterior Paint with 39 percent share.
- From the above insight home renovators can be reasonably considered as a premier consumer segment of paints.
The renovating homeowner demographics was as follows:
Age :
- 25 – 34 Years : 10 percent
- 35 – 54 Years : 48 percent
- 55+ Years : 43 percent
Income :
- Annual Household Income under CA$75,000: 21 percent
- Annual Household Income CA$ 75,000 — $124,999: 35 percent
- Annual Household Income CA$ 125,000 or higher: 44 percent
Marital Status:
- Married/In a civil union, spouse present: 72 percent
- Living with a significant other/In a domestic: 12 percent
- Single: 8 percent
- Divorced/Separated: 6 percent
- Widowed: 2 percent
- Other: 1 percent
Education
- Bachelor's degree: 31 percent
- Some college but no degree: 22 percent
- Master's degree/ Professional School degree: 18 percent
- Associate degree: 12 percent
- High school diploma or equivalent: 10 percent
- Doctorate degree: 2 percent
- Less than a high school diploma or equivalent: 1 percent
- Other: 4 percent
Living location
- Residents of Ontario spent the most on Home Renovation ($16,000 last year), followed by residents of British Columbia and Quebec ($9,900 per year.) Residents of Atlantic Canada spent $9,500 per year and residents of Alberta spent $7,400 per year.
Research Strategy
We began our research by exploring the annual reports, investor presentations and press releases of major paint companies operating in Canada, hoping to find the customer demographic data compiled by those companies, While this source provided some insight, a full demographic profile did not emerge from these sources and the data we did find was not granular enough to isolate information on Canadian home paint buyers.
Next, we turned to major publications such as AdWeek and Adage, sources that often offer insights into customer demographics. Unfortunately, we once again ran into the limitation that the Canadian home paint buying public was not sufficiently segmented in the data.
We then broadened the scope of our research to look at respected general media and press sources such as Canadian Business Journal, Financial Post, The Globe, and the Mail, among others. We found a few stories related to the industry, but nothing that provided clear demographic data.
Then we turned to market research and industry analysis sources such as Markets and Markets, Mordor Intelligence, GM Insights, Technavio as well as press release aggregators like PRNewswire, Businesswire, and GlobeNewswire. While we found a few paywalled reports that might contain the sought after data, we could not determine from the publicly accessible parts of the sources that the data within would be narrowly segmented enough to provide specific insights into the Canadian home pain buying customer's demographics.
Thinking creatively, we re-focused our research on case study databases, picking our Canadian paint company references in the hopes that an analysis of successful marketing pushed might contain demographic insights. Unfortunately, this strategy also failed to find the needed information.
We also tried looking at interviews and articles published by or on paint industry CMOs and C-suite execs int he paints industry. We had hoped that a member of the industry's leadership might share some specific insights into their customers via these formats. Unfortunately, these sources failed to offer detailed demographic information.
As a final strategy, we explored consumer database sources such as Numerator.com, Mintel, or data presented by IBIS world or Statista. Although some information relating to a section of users' demographics were partially available in sources such as Statista, the data was not extensive enough to resolve a demographic analysis of home paint consumers in Canada.
Throughout our research, we found many pieces of information adjacent to the sought after demographic data, pointedly a demographic breakdown of "home renovators" a customer base likely strongly overlapping home pain buyers. This data has been presented above.