Wavin Group (www.wavin.com) provides plastic pipe systems (the name derives from a contraction of the words WAter and VINyl chloride). Its products are used in the building industry for all aspects of water management, plumbing, heating and drainage.

Headquartered in Zwolle in the Netherlands (where it was founded in 1955), it is the leading global supplier of these systems and solutions in Europe, with a presence in 25 European countries and 40 manufacturing sites. Outside Europe, it has a global network of agents, licensees and distributors. It employs about 5500 people and has an annual turnover in the region of €1.2 billion. Since 2012, Wavin is part of the group Orbia, a global supplier of polymer, material and infrastructure solutions.

Wavin’s industrial brands (including WAVIN, OSMA, Hep₂O, Hepworth) span products and systems, designed and produced for a wide range of applications including gas, water, sewer systems, building, land drainage and irrigation, and cable ducting. It holds over 300 patents on products and processes and has a strong commitment to innovation as part of its overall business strategy; the group aims to achieve 20 per cent of its income from products less than five years old. Innovation also supports Wavin’s sustainability priorities, the company introducing technologies to ensure that its plastic pipes contain over 50 per cent recycled materials. It is ISO 9001 qualified and its products meet the requirements of BS EN ISO 140-1 and BS EN 1329-1 for non-pressure underground drainage pipes, and soil and waste discharge pipes, respectively.

Wavin provides complete solutions for customers, backed by a dedicated sales force with full marketing, technical, sales and operational infrastructure. And there is a very extensive range of different end-users for Wavin products, including:

• the jobbing builder replacing a set of gutters, fitting a new kitchen, building a new bathroom or repairing cracked drains below ground;

• the small building contractor refurbishing a whole house or building from scratch;

• large building contractors engaged in a whole residential housing development;

• engineering companies engaged in pipelining repairs or laying public access cable networks; and

• large civil and mechanical engineering companies building infrastructure projects such as whole water treatment plants.

However, end-users typically are not able to buy products from Wavin directly. Rather, products are purchased through a range of merchants. This makes relationships with the distributors very important for the company (and some of these companies are very large in their own right, e.g. Saint-Gobain, Travis Perkins). Of course, this does not mean that the company has no contact with many end-users. For example, Wavin’s strength in specification appeals to national house builders (such as Redrow and Taylor Wimpey). At the same time, while the company is interested in demand for its products in the round, with its sales team it recognizes that it may need to talk to clients and their designers about a whole solution, involving an entire range of products configured in the most appropriate way to solve a customer problem.

QUESTIONS

1. Identify some of the bases that Wavin can use to segment the market.
2. How would you characterize Wavin’s overall targeting strategy?
3. Compare Wavin’s possible market positioning with respect to the following, and describe how it might target each segment: small, jobbing builders; large, typically national, house builders; specifiers.
4. Using Wavin’s websites (www.wavin.com and wavin.co.uk) to help provide greater knowledge of its products and technologies, identify additional segments for it, stating the segmentation bases that you use. Use the criteria for successful segmentation to evaluate the usefulness of these proposed segments.