Going for the gold

When Mannington Resilient Floors introduced its Mannington Gold line of vinyl flooring last fall, the timing, it appeared, couldn't have been worse. The Salem, New Jersey based unit of Mannington Mills pumped an unprecedented $50 million into rolling out a new product in an industry feeling the full effect of a national recession. But with competitors Armstrong and Congoleum facing financial troubles, Mannington knew that the time was right, says Santo Torcivia, vice president for business analysis and planning, Mannington Resilient Floors.

"The timing of the introduction in terms of the economic environment was purposeful. We knew what we were doing. We picked the exact time of the year we wanted to do it. Everything was designed to be most fortuitous for Mannington."

And fortuitous it was. The stylish and durable Mannington Gold flooring has been a smash hit with consumers and improved Mannington's reputation with the trade. "Our research and development staff did a tremendous job in translating the research into a product within the time frame that they were given to do it. The product has been a success beyond all expectations and it's done tremendous things not only for Mannington with the trade but with its market share as well. It has driven a whole revitalization of the Mannington line," Torcivia says.

Years of research

The introduction of Mannington Gold was the culmination of years of consumer research and the product of Mannington's decision to shift from being a manufacturing driven firm to a more market driven one. That process began with the hiring of Tom McAndrews as president of Mannington Resilient Floors in 1989. McAndrews had been with Dupont, where he orchestrated the introduction of the highly successful Stainmaster carpet line, which gave a much needed boost to a slumping industry. Mannington hoped to score the same kind of hit by creating a new flooring product that offered consumers features that Mannington research had shown were missing from products currently on the market.

The effort to find out what those features were began in 1987 with a number of research efforts. First came strategic research with retailers and others in the trade to gauge perceptions of Mannington vis a vis its competitors and to determine what the company should do to increase and improve its industry profile. This was followed by consumer research to learn what hot buttons the company needed to push.

In addition to a telephone survey, Mannington used HTI Custom Research's monthly mail omnibus study to determine some basic purchase dynamics and the demographics of purchasers of floor coverings during the previous year. Consumers were asked about their level of satisfaction with the different kinds of floor coverings and what their strong and weak points were, Torcivia says.

"Because Mannington manufactures many types of floor coverings-wood, carpet, ceramic tile, vinyl-we measure usage in all of those areas. That research becomes useful for us later because if we want to go back to consumers and find out some detailed information, we already have a pool of names of people who have recently bought floor covering. Screening for floor covering purchases can be rather expensive and time consuming because it is a low incidence purchase, so HTI affords us a reasonable way to pick up the low incidence samples."

Two main weaknesses

Consumers indicated that the two main weaknesses of vinyl flooring were its lack of resistance to scuffing and indentations. Ceramic tile resisted these problems, but the research showed that it had its own comfort-related problems. Consumers viewed it as cold and unforgiving-if something fell on it, it broke, whereas with vinyl, the object might not break, but it could dent the floor.

With the help of the Vienna, Virginia office of Market Dynamics, Mannington performed statistical analysis of the research data to get an idea of how Mannington compared to competitors and how the different types of floor covering compared to each other in attributes such as maintenance, appearance, etc. "We plotted vinyl with wood, ceramic and carpeting along those dimensions to get a better understanding of our category," Torcivia says.

At the same time, various (often conflicting) reports of certain problems with vinyl flooring began to trickle in from the field. But the market was performing well, so no action was deemed necessary, Torcivia says. "It was difficult at that time to quantify the problems. The manufacturing people want to say the sales people can't sell. The sales people say the manufacturers don't know how to make a product. The manufacturing people will say, well, everybody's having the same problem. It goes back and forth. At that time, the market was growing so quickly, a lot of things got masked. Sales were going up, profits were going up, and nobody wanted to hear about problems."

New product necessary

During 1988-89 ceramic tile began to make inroads against vinyl, and rumblings about vinyl flooring from the industry continued. Following the early research studies, Mannington began efforts to increase awareness of its brand name while manufacturing the same products. But it was clear that a new product was necessary.

"Our research & development people said, 'Look, our sales people keep telling us we have to design something new and every three weeks they change the specs on us. We're sick of going down a road and having to reverse 180 degrees. We want some very specific market research.' Our marketing people were saying the same thing: What is it that people want in a vinyl flooring?"

With Market Dynamics and New York-based Meyers Research Mannington performed a full scale customer satisfaction survey of Mannington customers (using names taken from Mannington warranty cards) and of users of competitors' products in the high-end price categories who had purchased flooring within the past 18 months.

"We went out and visited them in their homes and talked to them about their vinyl floor coverings. We found that our satisfaction rate was lower than that for Armstrong. But across the board there was fairly high dissatisfaction rate for all vinyl floor coverings for indentations, either from high heels or furniture or dropped cans. The study gave us a good idea of the size of and context for the problems we were hearing from the field," Torcivia says.

This information was supplemented with interviews with retailers across the country who gave their impressions of Mannington, Armstrong and the products of other manufacturers.

The research confirmed that the drawbacks of vinyl floor covering were making customers for ceramic tile. "The indentation and scuffing situations were acute enough that people were buying ceramic as a reaction to the problems they had with vinyl," Torcivia says.

Conjoint studies

Armed with a definite direction to go in, the Mannington R&D staff developed a product to resist indentation and scuffing, and Mannington Gold was born. While the product was in testing, conjoint studies, done with Total Research, Princeton, New Jersey were performed to find the right mix of product features and pricing and also to predict sales volume.

"When you dial one product feature up, you dial another one down, so we wanted to be sure that what we dialed up were the hot buttons for the customer and what got dialed down in the process were the things that mattered less. That's why we needed to be sure that the features we had were the things that people really wanted. Scuff resistance and indentation resistance were by far the most significant issues. The conjoint study not only helped us come up with the proper product attributes and pricing but we also found out how we should market the product and it also predicted a sales volume."

Guarantees tested

Though testing showed that Mannington Gold would perform just as consumers wanted, the company faced the problem of convincing consumers that the product would deliver on its promises. "One of the issues that we struggled with was, how do you prove that your product does what you say it will do? We tested all kinds of guarantees with consumers and basically people said, 'If a company backs up its product, and put its money where its mouth is, we tend to believe them.' The thing is, what makes people skeptical is all the fine print, the exclusions."

So Mannington introduced an unconditional guarantee stating that the company would replace any Mannington Gold floor free of charge during the first year if consumers were unsatisfied with it for any reason. Mannington Gold also carries a ten-year warranty against wear and manufacturing defects.

Torcivia says that in the research, though consumers had high standards, they didn't place unrealistic demands on the product. "People had reasonable expectations. They know that if they walk on a product day in and day out and the sun shines on it, it will wear over time. The whole concept of Gold was that we wanted to set a new standard-that's how the product name evolved. Prior to Gold, the standard that products were measured by in the industry was the Armstrong inlaid products. But that reputation was based on a product that bears little resemblance to the product it has today, and the performance of it is not worthy of a standard, that's why we felt it was attackable. "

Styling issues

At the same time, separate from the conjoint work, research was conducted on styling issues. Using a display similar to those found in the retail setting, a variety of flooring samples from Mannington and its competitors were tested with consumers in mall facilities around the country.

(Torcivia credits the Mannington carpentry department with greatly simplifying the task of transporting and displaying the numerous heavy samples. A special mobile rack was created that moved on rollers for easy loading and unloading so that the rack could be taken to any location for testing. "I have to give kudos to our carpentry department. They designed the whole thing and it looked great. I just gave them some specs and they drew it up and built it and it was exactly what we were looking for.")

Respondents were screened to exclude people with a dislike of vinyl floors. "There are some people that consider vinyl floors to be plastic floors. We didn't want those people telling us what was good design."

Standard designs that were already popular weren't tested. Only those that Torcivia calls the "reach" designs were tested. After paging through the samples to get a feel for them, consumers rated patterns and colors. After all the samples were rated, they chose the one that they liked best, second best, etc., and those they liked the least. If respondents gave the samples a very high or a very low rating, verbatims were taken of their explanations why.

"We had the verbatims written up and our stylists could use them to correct any problems that consumers had with the designs. We found out a lot of information. For example, people liked certain designs, but pointed out that they wouldn't buy them for maintenance reasons. 'This color would show dirt too easily, this design would be too hard to keep clean.' This was the first time we had done any styling research and we started to see certain problems with some of the designs and factor them into our understanding."

Predicted sales

Thus far, the style research has accurately predicted the sales of certain Mannington Gold designs, Torcivia says. "They're selling now much in the way they were predicted to sell, except for one, that was found to be a far and away winner and it's selling like the rest of them."

Torcivia says that this is probably because of bias in the testing process. "To make sure that these people weren't just doing a beauty pageant, we asked them to pick the floors as if they were picking them for their own home. Then we tried to get a feeling for what their home decor was. What we don't know is, what the universe of home decors are. So even though they told us what their home decor is, one, there is always inaccuracy in their definition, and two, even though we had some prior research into the home decor universe, most of it's eclectic, and therefore it's meaningless in terms of trying to balance a sample against. We recognize that and we're currently looking into redesigning our testing process.

"We accept that styling is an important issue, but we address that at the point of sale. We want the customer to come to our display because our floors are better and we feel that if we've done our homework in terms of styling research that he or she will have no problem finding something that meets their color and design needs. The hook is durability, not styling," Torcivia says.

Massive program

Once the product was ready, the next task was to mount a massive marketing and public relations program. For this Mannington turned to the Weightman Group, a Philadelphia-based firm that Mannington has worked with since 1983.

In addition to introducing the new product, Mannington wanted to increase consumer and trade awareness of the Mannington name. Mannington and the Weightman Group decided that the best tool to accomplish both of those goals was a huge television advertising campaign. Until that point, says Betty Tuppeny, senior vice president and management supervisor, Weightman Advertising, the industry had traditionally relied on print advertising.

"Mannington was moving from being a trade-focused manufacturer to a consumer-focused company. One of the first things they had to do was establish themselves to the consumer. They had, relative to Armstrong and Congoleum, a weak brand awareness as a flooring company. So we needed to use the launch of Mannington Gold to almost instantaneously establish Mannington as a high quality flooring company that was going to deliver products that fulfilled consumers' needs," Tuppeny says.

Awareness doubled

The original television spot, "Breaking the Shine Barrier," was updated for the most recent campaign, which began airing in March. In addition, a host of new print ads were created for consumer publications. After the first seven week flight of television advertising, consumers' unaided and aided awareness of Mannington doubled.

"As a number two brand, we needed a pull strategy," Mannington's Santo Torcivia says. "One that was designed to create demand for the product, knowing that the trade would not fight a pre-sold customer. In addition, we knew the product would perform, so we wanted to communicate the features of the product to the market at large. We could not rely on the trade to do that. We wanted to influence people that might be going into a ceramic tile center or to a carpet store and tell them, Hey, Mannington has a better vinyl product.

"The other reason was, the number one way to influence the trade is to consumer advertise. We raised the stakes to the market by advertising to consumers, and because Armstrong and Congoleum are financially constrained, we knew no one would be able to compete at the level of consumer advertising that we had raised the ante to."

John Duke, director of research, Weightman Advertising, says that the Mannington Gold television spots were intended to push people into action. "This is a category in which there are a lot of fence sitters. You think about getting a floor, and then you think about it some more. The television (spot) was a way to nudge those people a little bit, to make the flooring more personally relevant to people."

Pushing people into action was also one of the intentions behind the extensive Mannington Gold guarantee, Tuppeny says. "The warranty is really a tie breaker for the consumer. A lot of people consider flooring, beyond the pattern and color, from a manufacturing standpoint, to be a commodity product. Consumers want to know what the differences are. We found (the guarantee) was a very useful point of sale tool, to able to say this brand is guaranteed to provide customer satisfaction and this one isn't.

"With the guarantee, we wanted to say, 'Here's what we found out the consumers wanted through the research. Here's the product we developed and it is by far superior. We're so sure of it that we're going to put our money where our mouth is and we will replace any floor during the first year with literally no questions asked,"' Tuppeny says.

Television also offered an advantage over print in that it helped meet an objective of the Mannington Gold introduction, which was to take the competition by surprise. Because of the lead time that many magazines require in production, print ads for Mannington Gold would have had to be delivered to the magazines months before the planned launch date, and there were concerns over the possibility of information leaking to competitors.

Supplemented techniques

In testing the ads, Duke says that, Weightman supplemented its usual research techniques to suit the aims of the Mannington ads. "When we did the ad testing we incorporated designs that would allow us to do two things. We wanted to use the traditional measures to make sure the advertising is working in terms of recall and diagnostics, and also to use a persuasion measure that would also allow us to capture attitude change on behalf of people.

"The product category has its own set of needs. Because vinyl flooring is some thing that people are not always in the market for. A lot of things happen during the buying process, you go on an information search and process a lot of information and learn a lot about the different products available. So we couldn't use the traditional persuasion measure, which was, 'Now that you've seen the advertising, how likely are you to buy?' The ad has to have staying power, so that when the consumer does go to the store, even if it's several months down the road, their memory is jogged," Duke says.

Struck it rich

By all indications, Mannington has struck it rich with Mannington Gold. Sales are up, tracking studies with the trade have shown extremely high awareness of Mannington Gold, and a large percentage of retailers have said that Mannington was the brand they were recommending most to consumers. And research has found significant increases in all of the attribute ratings over the previous year.

"It's very much been a classic marketing exercise, a consumer-driven product development process and introduction where you find out where the needs and the gaps and then dedicate and mobilize all resources to fulfill them," Duke says.