Integrated
Annual Report 2016

Customers

Mar­ket cul­ti­va­tion re­mains in­tense

With the in­te­gra­tion of the ce­ram­ics busi­ness in its es­tab­lished sales struc­tures, Geberit sub­stan­tially strength­ened its pres­ence in many mar­kets. Since the be­gin­ning of 2016, each mar­ket has been ser­viced by one local sales com­pany only. The more than 800 ad­vi­sors de­ployed through­out Eu­rope no longer focus on spe­cific prod­uct areas, but rather on dif­fer­ent cus­tomer seg­ments, such as the whole­sale trade, plumbers and plan­ners, ar­chi­tects and show­rooms. This means that the ad­vi­sors must have very broad prod­uct knowl­edge in order to pro­vide com­pre­hen­sive sup­port to their cus­tomers.

Ar­chi­tects, plan­ners and en­gi­neer­ing of­fices are in­creas­ingly using BIM (Build­ing In­for­ma­tion Mod­el­ling) to op­ti­mise and in­te­grate their processes. Nowa­days, it is es­sen­tial for man­u­fac­tur­ers of san­i­tary prod­ucts to pro­vide the rel­e­vant BIM data, in par­tic­u­lar for large pro­jects. Geberit has there­fore started record­ing the BIM data for all rel­e­vant prod­ucts, and now makes the data avail­able for down­load to cus­tomers across the world.

For decades, Geberit’s broad range of train­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties has been a proven in­stru­ment for re­tain­ing cus­tomers. Dur­ing the re­port­ing year, more than 30,000 cus­tomers were pro­vided with ed­u­ca­tion and fur­ther train­ing on Geberit prod­ucts, tools and soft­ware tools at the 25 Geberit in­for­ma­tion cen­tres in Eu­rope and over­seas. In ad­di­tion, a total of around 90,000 cus­tomers be­came more fa­mil­iar with Geberit know-how and prod­ucts at ex­ter­nal events, some of which were or­gan­ised in co­op­er­a­tion with mar­ket part­ners.

Mar­ket pres­ence of Geberit Aqua­Clean ex­panded fur­ther

The ad­ver­tis­ing mea­sures for Geberit Aqua­Clean shower toi­lets fo­cused on 13 cam­paign mar­kets in Eu­rope. As in the pre­vi­ous year, the Geberit Aqua­Clean truck went on a major tour, this time to the Nether­lands, Bel­gium, the UK and for a sec­ond time to Ger­many. Under the motto “My first time”, the mo­bile show­room and test unit of­fered in­ter­ested par­ties the op­por­tu­nity to try out an Aqua­Clean shower toi­let at their leisure and as­sess the var­i­ous mod­els.

The strat­egy of of­fer­ing po­ten­tial end users the op­por­tu­nity to try out a shower toi­let for them­selves was also fol­lowed in Italy, Den­mark, Aus­tria and Switzer­land. The Swiss and Aus­trian sales com­pa­nies, for ex­am­ple, made a mo­bile Aqua­Clean WC lounge avail­able to the pub­lic at se­lected con­certs, sport­ing events and other major events. In the re­port­ing year, it was pos­si­ble to es­tab­lish con­tact with around 15,000 end users with these two lounges.

The in­ter­na­tional sales ini­tia­tive for mid-range and high-end ho­tels also made ex­cel­lent progress. More than 60 new hotel pro­jects were ac­quired in the re­port­ing year, which pushed up the num­ber of four- and five-star ho­tels equipped with Aqua­Clean shower toi­lets in Eu­rope to 350.

The pre­mium Aqua­Clean Mera model launched in Sep­tem­ber of the pre­vi­ous year met with a very pos­i­tive re­sponse in all mar­kets. This un­ex­pected level of suc­cess led to an order back­log, which has since been re­duced by the fast ex­pan­sion of our in­ter­nal ca­pac­ity to pro­duce the so­phis­ti­cated ce­ramic san­i­tary ap­pli­ances. De­mand, which has re­mained per­sis­tently high, has been met on time again since the fourth quar­ter.

Di­rect link to san­i­tary pro­fes­sion­als

Most of Geberit’s mar­ket­ing ac­tiv­i­ties con­tin­ued to tar­get san­i­tary pro­fes­sion­als and en­tre­pre­neurs. Proven mea­sures such as cus­tomer vis­its, train­ing and the pub­li­ca­tion of reg­u­larly up­dated tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments, brochures and mag­a­zines, on­line plat­forms and apps were con­tin­ued and de­vel­oped fur­ther. The suc­cess­ful "Geberit On Tour" cam­paign was re­peated for the sixth time in the re­port­ing year. Spe­cially fit­ted-out mo­bile show­rooms vis­ited local and re­gional whole­salers and of­fered plumbers the op­por­tu­nity to as­sess Geberit in­no­va­tions and so­lu­tions di­rectly on site. In 2016, more than 25,000 vis­i­tors were ad­dressed at more than 900 events in 16 coun­tries.

Fully in­te­grated trade fair pres­ence

In 2016, nu­mer­ous trade fairs were once again used as plat­forms to demon­strate Geberit’s in­no­v­a­tive strength and to fos­ter and en­large the net­work of con­tacts in the mar­ket. Im­por­tant trade fairs at­tended were Bat­i­bouw in Brus­sels, the Ideal Home Show in Lon­don, Swiss­bau in Basel, Aquatherm in Vi­enna, SHK in Essen as well as the Kitchen & Bath In­dus­try Show in Las Vegas. Ar­chi­tects and de­sign­ers were specif­i­cally tar­geted at the Fuori Sa­lone and the Sa­lone del bagno in Milan.

A new trade fair con­cept was de­vel­oped in the re­port­ing year and suc­cess­fully im­ple­mented for the first time in Bel­gium in Oc­to­ber. With this con­cept, sev­eral brands can be ex­hib­ited jointly at Geberit’s stand, which guar­an­tees a first-class pre­sen­ta­tion of ce­ramic san­i­tary ap­pli­ances and bath­room fur­ni­ture in ad­di­tion to the reg­u­lar, more tech­ni­cal prod­uct range. The achiev­able syn­er­gies in­clude the re­duc­tion of the ex­hi­bi­tion space re­quired at a trade fair – in the pre­vi­ous year, Geberit still needed three large ex­hi­bi­tion stands at the ISH in Frank­furt – and the joint pre­sen­ta­tion of prod­ucts and im­proved cross-sell­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.