Adam Sand outlines seven tactics for roofing companies to stand out in a commoditized industry: storytelling through video and podcasts, building a community around the owner, creating emotional connections through giving, manufacturing scarcity, innovating sales and marketing, combining tactics, and staying authentic. Since roofing materials and methods rarely differ, perception is everything.
What is a brand? A healthy way to think about brand in its simplest digestible terms is it's the association of the known with the unknown. You're associating the known, your company, with the people who work for you so that you can lend that authority to the people who work for you so that they have an advantage in their conversations, whether it be a site supervisor or a production manager. You're associating the known with the unknown. But to kind of demonstrate my point, if I put my picture of me next to this person, that means something to some people. If I put my face next to this person, it means something to some other people. It has a different association with who I am. If you don't know who that is, that's Lee Haight. If I put me next to this, you think about me in a different way. So you're taking the known, a cute little baby, or the known, a popular face in the roofing industry, or, you know, a woman who has a storied history. If you put me next to those things, it makes me look different. The point is, is you're trying to associate the known with the unknown. In many cases, RBP, when it started out, I was RBP. Now RBP is bigger than me, so it associates the people that work for us with the RBP brand. So we have to think, what are the ways to stand out? It won't be the shingles that you sell because you sell the same shingles as your competitors. It won't be the way you install them because as much as you like to say we put quality roofs and we do the best install and da da da da da, it's the same install. The people you hire don't even necessarily work for you. They're subcontractors that could work for your competitor tomorrow. So it's not really the install, and it's being installed by the same kind of people. It's not like a restaurant where you go to McDonald's and you get 5 ounces or whatever of beef for $7, and then you go to Ruth's Chris and you get 5 ounces of beef for $49. The reason usually is the ambiance, the people, right? You're going to get it brought to you by a professional waiter. You're not putting cheerleaders up on the roof, you know. It's like the same kind of people. We're using the same tools, right? We're seeing CertainTeed's roof install robot. There might be some different tools that come to the industry, you know. You could maybe stand out with like, say, a catch-all or something. Same tools, same install, and same price. I say that, you know, roofing is a sea of the same, especially in your marketing, because in your marketing it's really tough to say anything that's different than your competitor. So you want to be remarkable in some way. You want other people to remark upon you. You want to be able to tell a story. Storytelling is a powerful tool that RBP has been an advocate of for years with customers to try and have an emotional level to your business. For roofing businesses yourself sharing the story behind your company, often through video, but I've even seen the re-emergence of podcasting in the roofing space. There's also the concept of leveraging a tribe, right, which means building a community around shared interests and leading that community. And this is something that's turned roofing companies into national brands, owners into these popular gurus. Like Martin Pettigrew is one of those people. Dimitri is one of those people, right? Dimitri is just an immigrant that ran a small roofing company, but he built a very serious tribe of people around him. I don't care about whether you like him or not. It's just, did he build a tribe or not? Yes, he did. There's also developing an emotional connection. You can develop an emotional connection with your customers through something like the act of giving. And then there's also creating scarcity. Creating scarcity increases perceived value, and this can be used at the brand level all the way down to the individual deal level. It just comes out to being strategic in your efforts, but finding ways to retain some authenticity and then also trying to find ways to innovate. In an industry like roofing, it can be difficult to innovate because most of us don't install our own roofs or make the products that we install. So it really comes down to innovating the marketing and sales process in a way so we can stand out from the crowd. And the 7th way to stand out is to do them all. This is how you create a remarkable brand.
