BACKGROUND
Founded in 1938, Kichler today is one of the leading brands for decorative lighting (interior and exterior), landscape lighting, cabinet and accent lighting and ceiling fans for both commercial and residential markets. The brand can be found today throughout channels offering lighting fixtures from specialty dealers to home centers with consumer and professional customer bases.
SITUATION
Up until 2014, Kichler was primarily a “specialty” brand, sold through lighting showroom dealers where the brand’s role in the purchase decision was minimal to non-existent.
With new distribution through home centers in 2014, Kichler found itself in a huge “self-service” channel with virtually no brand recognition and without a sales associate pushing their brand at the store. It was within this context that Kichler initiated a branding process with Strategic Partners.
PROCESS
Through blind channel visits, in-home interviews and quantitative research, it was found that consumers were:
– Virtually unaware of Kichler and their competition by brand name
– Inundated by the large number of styles and designs to choose from
– Unaware of the importance of room dimensions and fixture size choice
+ Appreciative of the effect of lighting fixtures
+ Aware of the growth of LED technology
+ Inspired by the category but lacking confidence in “getting it right”
Additionally, consumers are driven by their personal tastes and quality perceptions along with the recommendations of dealers, not the brand. In fact, consumers purchasing and even installing expensive fixtures were unaware of their brand. Essentially, the dealers sold Kichler products to consumers, not Kichler.
CORE ESSENCE
With the primary consumer target being recent home owning Millennials, the following core essence was reached through data distillation and guided brainstorming.
RESULTS
Solid consumer sales and brand equity year-to-year advances for 2015, 2016 and 2017.
