What are the potential end customers of the heat market like? The customer segmentation challenge on the heat market

Due to the increasing role of the digitalization and the emergence of new consumption patterns, end customers became empowered decision makers. They show the tendency to trust less the professionals and rather consult their social environment by their purchase decisions. As a consequence, marketers – who apply a 2-step sales strategy, by focusing on the professionals at the first place – are challenged in their customer segmentation. It is essential for marketers to get a deeper insight into the underlying motives and motivators behind the end customer attitude towards heating products, as installers fulfill less and less the mediator role in the purchase process between end customers and heating manufacturers. In this paper the authors treat the heating market as a special case, where they put the end customers in the focus of the research – instead of the heating technology they adopt – and investigate the characteristics of the potential end customers, their needs, expectations and purchase motivation. The authors carried out a two-step explorative research with homeowners in Hungary, which they consider as the first step in the investigation of the end customer characteristics from a marketing managerial approach. The results show that in general end customers are mainly driven by financial and functional factors in their customer behavior and plan the purchase deliberately instead of facing and emergency situation, which means that heating manufacturers have a lead time to reach end customers with tailored offers.