Plumbing Branding: Definition, Importance, Actions, Risks

What is Branding for Plumbers?

Branding is the act of giving your company a distinct identity.

Branding for plumbers encompasses strategies for creating a unique identity that influences how the general public—customers, prospects, and the public—perceives the company.

The goal is to distinguish your company from others offering similar services and encourage customers to think of you first when they need a plumber.

In a recent webinar, Dan Antonelli, president and creative director at KickCharge Creative, rightly described the degree of impact branding has on a company and its operations.

“Branding is how people feel about your company, what they say about your company behind your back.”

Ryan Kettering, owner of Prolific Brand Design, says, “To me, the brand is really, ‘Who do people think you are? What do people think about you in the market?’.” 

“And so that comes from many different things, and everything contributes to that.”

Contrary to what people think, branding for plumbing companies and plumbing companies’ brand identity, though related, are different concepts. 

Ryan Kettering rightly contrasts the two by saying, “Your brand is what people say about you, but your branding is [when] you try to coordinate and [communicate] that.”

That means the brand is customers’ perception of your company, while branding encompasses actions you take to shape those perceptions.

The key elements of branding plumbing companies can focus on are the following:

• Color palette

• Slogan

• The tone of voice used for messaging and public communications

• Font type

• Positioning

• Choice and style of visual assets

• Service quality

Later, we’ll touch on each of these elements. For now, let’s try to understand why there’s so much emphasis on branding.

Why Is Branding Important for Plumbing Businesses?

Branding is important for plumbing businesses because powerful brands tend to have a healthy cash flow. Unsurprisingly, the companies with the most valuable brands mirror the list of firms with the highest revenue valuations worldwide.

Branding also has an outsized influence on consumers’ buying decisions. 

According to a Yopto study, 84 percent of customers say they’re more inclined to buy from a brand whose values match theirs. Fifty-nine percent of respondents in the same study say they prefer to postpone their purchase until their favorite brand’s products become available.

Furthermore, customers generally believe plumbing companies with powerful brands are more capable of handling high-dollar jobs such as repipes and water heater replacements.

“If I'm dropping $20,000 on a heating and air system with your company, I want to make sure that you will be around next year to service it,” Antonelli says. “So I'm willing to pay a little bit more for that because I believe that the deliverable and the service I'm going to get from you is better.”

Here are some other benefits of branding for plumbing businesses:

• Lower customer churn: Implementing branding principles solidifies customers’ emotional connection to your company. They become your customers for life and recommend you to others.

• Builds trust: Customers naturally have reservations about the people they let into their homes and scrutinize every company they wish to hire. A great brand built around empathy and transparency eases the customer's mind, which grows trust and encourages them to let you into their homes.

• Reduces customer acquisition costs: Companies with generic brand identities consistently run costly marketing campaigns to stay in customers’ minds. Conversely, those with distinct brand identities spend less, as their prominent position in customers’ minds gives their campaigns extra punch.

• Reinforces brand impact: Customers are more likely to trust your company when they consistently interact with your brand identity elements. This generates repeat purchases and solidifies trust.

How Can You Build Your Plumbing Company’s Brand?

Branding is too important a marketing strategy to be approached without forethought. It’s imperative to approach the process with care and deep planning.

Agreed, it can be taxing. However, invested time and resources in branding yield increased revenue, awareness, and trust.

While branding is an ongoing process, here are seven steps to create a solid brand identity that you can build upon.

1. Research your audience

Branding must be targeted at a specific group. Companies that want to create a powerful brand identity must conduct in-depth research, to understand their target audience and create a resonating brand identity.

To research your audience, you must first identify who they are. Are they homeowners, property owners, large institutions, general contractors, or government agencies?

Once that’s out of the way, create a buyer persona document (if you don’t have any already) for your various target audience segments. They should contain the following:

• Demographics

• Income levels

• Psychographics

• Current plumbing pain points

Commercial plumbing companies should also profile the institutions or entities they serve, focusing on their annual revenue, location, average size, and industry.

Details for your buyer persona documents can be obtained from one-on-one interviews, review sites, forums, plumbing industry reports, local authority archives, competitors, and social media.

2. Define your USP

USP (unique selling proposition) is what you offer that customers can’t get from competitors. It could be anything from a 24/7 emergency service to free estimates, financing options, unique expertise, or repair warranties.

Before defining your USP, identify what problems potential customers are battling with that your competitors have either ignored or been unable to solve. You can interview customers, read complaints in local directories, and check local community forums. 

This will enable you to create a unique USP that sticks out.

For example, you notice from interviews that competitors have been ripping off customers using surprise add-ons and other sleazy tricks. Your USP would then promise transparent pricing without hidden or surprise fees.

The USP should be prominently featured on your social media handles and homepage. You can also turn it into a slogan or tagline.

3. Determine your brand’s voice and personality

Brand voice is a company's tone, word choice, language, and style in public-facing communications. It cuts across social media posts, adverts, email newsletters, website copy, and press releases.

On the other hand, a brand’s personality is simply the voice people hear when reading its public communications. It can be quirky, friendly, formal, classic, adventurous, sophisticated, etc.

Your chosen brand voice must reflect the audience segment you serve. For example, a plumbing company servicing institutions and large organizations can’t afford to use a playful brand voice characterized by pop slang. That’s best reserved for residential plumbing companies that service homeowners.

Your chosen brand voice must be repeated across all touchpoints. People who land on your website, read an article, interact with a post, or talk with a CSR should immediately hear your unique voice and visualize the personality it represents.  

4. Establish your brand’s colors and logo

A company’s colors and logos embody its personality and appearance, defining customers' perceptions. Both elements form the foundation of a company’s brand identity.

When picking a color or logo, the key is to differentiate from competitors rather than copy them. Customers should be able to see your company assets anywhere, immediately recognize they’re yours, and not mistake them for those of another company.

Another principle is to pick a color or logo that inspires a specific emotion and resonates with your target audience. Research the psychological theory of colors and draw inspiration from the environment, the colors of the area’s football team, the state’s nickname, the area’s topography, etc.

For example, Lance Ball channeled familiar elements when creating Aspen Mountain Plumbing’s brand identity.

He chose a plumbing company name based on Wyoming’s mountainous topography. The colors were inspired by the University of Wyoming’s colors, the tribe native to the state, and the area’s rock formations.

“Brown and gold may seem ugly to most people, but they mean home to Wyoming people,” Ball said. “The only four-year college that Wyoming has is the University of Wyoming, and their colors are brown and gold. And it's resonated throughout the community and the state, from license plates to all sorts of different things.”

For this reason, anyone interacting with the brand immediately thinks of home, and the area’s residents are emotionally attached to the brand—consciously or subconsciously.

“We knew that if we picked brown and gold as our colors, that would basically give us a flagpole that we're a local company, we're born and raised right here in Wyoming,” Ball added.

When designing a logo, pick an image that aligns with your brand personality. It could be an abstract image, emblem, or icon. You could also go for a wordmark, monogram, or icon.

5. Establish your brand’s values

Brand values are the strong beliefs and principles a company holds and uses to make decisions, including the people it hires, how it treats customers, and the vendors it buys from.

For example, what do you think of whenever you see a Lego set? Creativity? Innovation? Well, that’s precisely what the company’s brand values center on, as evidenced by its Rebuild the World campaign. The same applies to notable brands such as Disney, Adidas, Starbucks, Apple, and Google.

Brand values help inspire brand loyalty, as 77 percent of customers buy from brands with shared values. They also help in employee recruitment, which is critical considering the current talent shortage.

To establish your brand values, take stock of your beliefs. 

What changes am I desirous and capable of making in the world today? Do I have any issues with how other companies operate? What are my sources of inspiration? How can my company engineer change in the plumbing industry?

If you’re an established business, survey your current pain points. What are customers’ recurring complaints? What are employees’ major concerns?

Answering each question sincerely will reveal potential brand values.

Once you have decided on a brand value, make it official. Communicate it to employees and the general public via internal and external documentation.

6. Create your brand’s story

The brand story narrates how a business started and its impact on the company’s current mission and values. It details why the founder launched the business and the obstacles they had to overcome to take it to the next level.

A well-crafted brand story uses our natural tendency to connect with great stories to humanize the company. The goal is for customers to remember who you are, understand what you stand for, and connect emotionally with your company after reading it.

To create your brand story, identify what drove you to start the business and determine how it impacts current business operations. Then, use any of the following frameworks to narrate your story:

• The hero’s journey: Position the company founder as the hero who comes up with an idea, sets out to accomplish it, encounters obstacles, and comes out on top.

• Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle Framework: Explain why the founder started the company, how they implemented their ideas, and the result (the number of branches, customers helped, revenue generated, etc).

You can get inspiration from Brown’s Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing’s brand story, hosted on its About Us page.

This is a great example of the hero’s storytelling framework in action. However, you can flip it on its head by making customers the story's hero. 

How does your journey make you the person to resolve their plumbing issues? What feelings do customers who interact with your company walk away with? Eric Thomas, president of Rival Digital and host of the Smart HVAC Marketing podcast, succinctly explains how plumbing companies can do this in a recent webinar.

“Our successful contractors are creating a story brand where the homeowner is the hero and you, as the contractor, are the guide.”

Think about the Star Wars saga, he suggests. Be Yoda, the guide who shows Luke Skywalker, aka your customer, how to be a hero.

7. Integrate your brand into your business

Integrating your brand into your business involves publishing it across all customer touchpoints, including digital assets, fliers, and out-of-home advertising materials. Customers should get the same brand experience regardless of the channel they contact you.

Employees should embody the brand and reinforce it when interacting with customers.

You should also create a style guide and a centralized visual identity document. Then, use it for internal and external communications, promotional materials (print or digital), and the company’s visual identity.

What Can Harm a Plumbing Brand?

One misstep, bad review, or ethical violation can leave a plumbing company’s brand in tatters, which is bad news since news travels fast in the home services industry. Customers may refuse to hire such a company, opting for those with a positive brand image.

Avoid the following to keep your brand image positive:

1. Negative customer experience

Proper Software recently surveyed 2,000 customers to learn the factors they consider when choosing brands and staying loyal to them. The results were not unexpected, considering our dislike for bad experiences:

• 54 percent of all consumers would stop using a brand after just one bad experience.

• 24 percent of consumers will break up with a brand over inconsistent or obsolete online product information.

• 58 percent of consumers have recently switched from a brand they love to its competitor.

This shows that most customers are ready to shift immediately from a brand they’ve grown connected to after just one bad experience. The emotional capital the company has earned with them in the past goes down the drain.

This is why we advise brands to always deliver quality service, from when customers call to when the project is concluded. That’s why we designed our Customer Experience software to help plumbing companies deliver a positive experience from the beginning to the end of the job cycle.

Plumbing companies use the software to text customers appointment reminders, brief technician bios, and live technician tracking links.

This ensures customers will be available when the tech arrives and counters their reservations about letting strangers into their homes. Also, technicians are more likely to avoid detours and arrive early, knowing the customer can track their movements.

ServiceTitan’s Customer Experience software also allows customers to communicate with plumbing companies via text. Such a direct communication channel makes it easier to resolve complaints quickly before they are broadcast online.

2. Inconsistent marketing

Imagine you saw a blue-themed Coca-Cola marketing campaign. What would be the first thing on your mind? PepsiCo, right? That’s the result of inconsistent branding or a fragmented brand experience. 

Customers may mistake your company for a competitor or forget your brand entirely. Therefore, they’ll contact competitors whenever their faucet needs replacing, or the air conditioners stop working.

To maintain brand consistency, create content and brand style guideline repositories that every employee can access. Share them with marketing agencies and freelancers at the beginning of the engagement, and have an employee scrutinize every deliverable for brand alignment before it’s launched.

Additionally, use ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing platform to create branded, customizable email and SMS templates using pre-designed samples.

Customizable branded templates will help you easily maintain consistency across all campaigns and communications with customers.

3. Low employee morale

Happy employees will be more willing to go above and beyond to find innovative ways to meet customers’ needs and resolve plumbing issues. Their positive attitude can manifest in customer interactions, creating a positive brand image.

To boost employee morale, pay them a fair and competitive wage, and actively invest in their development—send them to conferences, enroll them in plumbing courses, etc.

Furthermore, hire employees with the right attitude that aligns with your brand values so they don’t disrupt the working environment. 

4. Controversial views

Brands with controversial views suffer reputational and brand damage. Customers will boycott the company, opting for competitors with a positive brand image.

It doesn’t end there. Such companies will find attracting and retaining top talents difficult, as employees prefer working for companies with matching values.

Therefore, avoid commenting on polarizing topics. But if you must comment, seek diverse perspectives and consider ethical implications before taking a stance. 

5. Bad user experience

Visitors’ experience on your website determines if they will return to book an appointment and view your brand positively. In fact, recent research shows that companies with websites designed with trust-building components have an edge over competitors.

Plumbing websites must have an interactive menu, uncluttered design, and clear copy so customers can quickly find the necessary information. It should also load fast and be optimized for mobile devices so visitors don’t leave for competitors’ websites.

6. Lack of transparency

Underhanded practices like charging hidden fees above the initially agreed price, lying about service benefits, and failing to provide timely updates to customers can erode your brand image. 

Potential clients will avoid hiring your company to handle plumbing issues and may even encourage others to do the same.

To avoid this, be transparent about service costs and don’t add extra fees later. You should also provide detailed estimates and itemized invoices outlining the cost of each service rendered.

Lastly, provide customers with job-progress reports regularly and only promise what you can deliver.

7. Low-quality services

Plumbing companies that offer subpar services eventually experience legal issues and heightened customer dissatisfaction, damaging their brand image. Customers don’t return to book appointments, they leave negative reviews, and they encourage others to avoid the company.

The best way to avoid such incidents is to train employees to deliver excellent customer service and respond to inquiries with empathy. Encourage technicians to go all out when accessing homeowner’s complaints and finding solutions.

Ryan Chute, an expert in branding neuroscience, says, “If we can demonstrate empathy [and] competence and… deliver on convenience, then we're able to shine as bright as the rest.”

8. Poor or nonexistent customer support

Customers dislike navigating call trees or being put on hold, especially when they have an emergency plumbing issue such as clogged sewer lines and gas leaks.

Worse yet, keeping a friendly demeanor in the face of a barrage of phone calls can prove challenging. CSRs may go off on customers who forget to enter key details and schedule appointments. This gives the company a bad brand image, discouraging prospects from booking jobs.

Travis Ringe, co-owner of ProSkill Services, says, “Customers don’t like to navigate a call tree; they don’t like to go to voicemail.” 

We created the Phones Pro platform after recognizing the impact of a seamless call booking process on a plumbing company’s brand image. The platform offers different benefits not available on a desktop phone. 

Once a call comes in, ServiceTitan automatically searches for and displays the customer’s details, including their name, job history, and property data. However, if it’s a new customer, the system displays drop-down menus and prompts that CSRs can use to collect the data that techs need to execute the job successfully.

This allows CSRs to address customers by name and dedicate their time to solving their needs instead of switching between windows or trying to enter information using spreadsheets or clipboards.

ServiceTitan’s Phones Pro also lets you accept customer calls from outside the office. You can use the platform’s sentiment analysis and auto-generated transcripts to identify customers requiring immediate attention.

Finally, the platform provides support agent insights such as hold times, missed and completed calls, and abandon rates.

You can use these insights to improve the quality of customer support and implement strategies to reduce wait times.

9. Ignoring customer feedback

However tempting it may sound to avoid negative customer feedback, doing so only makes it harder for people to trust you. It portrays your company as dishonest and makes customers feel undervalued, attracting negative publicity and lowering brand loyalty.

Unfortunately, responding to customer feedback can be a logistical nightmare. Moving from one platform to another can be time-consuming.

You can hire an extra employee to handle the process or use ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro – Reputation platform, which consolidates customer feedback from different review sites into one place.

The platform notifies you whenever customers submit new reviews on any of your listings and lets you identify negative ones using star rating filters. This ensures you respond to and resolve complaints quickly.

The Bottom Line

Branding is critical to a plumbing company’s success and cannot be avoided. Take time to invest in branding, and you’ll reap the benefits in the long run.

Apart from creating brand assets, remember to do the basics properly. Provide quality service, practice transparency, have a responsive customer support system, and act on customer feedback.

ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built to help service companies streamline their operations and generate more revenue. Our cloud-based platform is used by thousands of contractors nationwide, and they have increased their revenue by an average of 25 percent in just their first year with us.