A wood floor is not just a decoration choice. It is the expression of an individual personality. It’s a style. And you need to bear this in mind with your customers
Parquet cannot be ‘sold’. A customer comes to appreciate it as something of quality which ‘decorates the floor’. This phrase always raises an ironic smile and a comment “I wish!”. What I want to emphasise is that parquet is considered as part of everything which determines the quality of life.
First of all parquet is not a floor, but a style
Canada is cold, very cold. A wooden floor, which you can walk on with bare feet, is very inviting. In the United States, the temperature is milder than in the north, but parquet gives you something to sit on to drink a drop of wine. These examples might seem exaggerated, even though they summarise lifestyles and personal, intimate ways of socializing, but they confirm the concept that parquet is not just a floor, but a style.
Still speaking of North America, do you remember the great battle between parquet and fitted carpet. This has now been more or less won by wood, even though we must give carpet an honourable surrender as it was typical of an epoch.
Nowadays, we do not use parquet just to cover a floor, but, on the contrary, wood decorates and leaves its mark. It brings a certain aroma and style of life to a house. This is the first concept you have to understand and transmit to your customers, when you are making a presentation of the product.
Parquet: hygiene and warmth
In a world in which we all suffer from allergies, parquet has an extra value of ‘cleanliness’ and therefore health. We all need things around us to be clean. Wood floors are the answer to various allergies (let’s remember the constant attention necessary for people who live with animals, cats, dogs etc.) But this is not all. Wood is also a help in the case of disabled people at home. We can easily mount and move guides on wood to direct wheelchair movements and ease difficulties for those who are differently able.
Wood floors retain heat – and this is important for elderly people who struggle constantly with the cold – and softens any falls, which can be very serious at an advanced age.
“Tell me about yourself and I’ll show you your ideal wood floor”
You have to attribute a behavioural style to every type of wood floor. Even though there are still technical differences between one type or another, customers must fully understand their choice, which must be connected to different lifestyles.
A young couple, on the threshold of a life which will include children, do well to choose a light coloured floor tone, while more mature people, with adolescent children, can tend towards darker tones, which suggest a house which is always kept tidy. The important thing is to stop presenting the product only from the point of view of its technical characteristics without considering the importance of behavioural and personality identification. In short, when selling, the thought should be “Tell me about yourself and I’ll show you your ideal wood floor”.
We are talking about a ‘game’ as a new dimension in the relationship between a floor and its use, a dimension which has never before been considered as an expression of personality.
The price factor
If I was a powerful man, able to manage a factory producing parquet, I would say to the clients that price is truly the last thing to think about, in the sense that they need to have open minds to consider all aspects.
This does not mean I would like to sell all floors in instalments. However, what I want to say is that it is necessary to suit the payment to the client and, for example, consider every instalment on the basis of the client’s income. This means personalizing payments according to the clients’ needs. Once they have paid a deposit and reached 45% of the cost of the floor, they will start to see it being ‘laid’. When the work is finished and a reckoning is done 55-60% of the cost will have been paid and the rest will come after.
Therefore, it is possible to find the right relationship between income and monthly instalment to have a wood floor and this means that the market opens the door to competition. A hypothesis could be that 5% or 7% of monthly income would be what the floor layer could ask for the work.
In a post-globalization era (therefore a critical moment of transition from globalization) it is important that the cost of a wood floor does not exclude anyone from having one. The product’s characteristics just need to be explained well.
Do you work with a high-end quality product? The subject naturally changes. If you can explain to your customer (who is economically comfortable) the intrinsic quality of the product (hand-made!) which you are selling and the enormous advantages of a wood floor (in terms of health, eco-compatibility, design personalization), the price factor becomes of secondary importance.
Layers and sellers – what’s their approach?
‘Selling’ is a horrible word. Going back to the start of this article, it is not about selling something but about explaining its use.
Look at how the terminology changes too. Someone who wants – and lives – parquet is not a customer, but a user who chooses a particular lifestyle.
All of these matters and details should be organized into a dialogue (not a monologue!) with whoever visits the showroom or parquet shop. I could even say that it would be wise, as a playful exercise, to make a parquet user complete a lighthearted questionnaire to identify their parquet soul mate. All these aspects necessitate the organization of a sales plan which is innovative and ‘aggressive’ in the sense that it can profoundly influence the way of presenting the world of parquet to the user.
The author
Giovanni Carlini is a consumer sociologist. In his own words, he has been “taught to appreciate the world of parquet since 2000” and found himself “catapulted into North America, becoming a member of the National Wood Flooring Association”. Speaking of parquet, in the last 17 years, he has committed himself to understanding client behavior and how parquet is presented and ‘explained’. Up to now he has visited and studied 4,000 companies (out of the 98,000 currently active in the United States and Canada) which produce or sell parquet. In his words, “I still have a lot to learn”.
