Marketing for a global manufacturer

Plumbing pioneers

John Guest is an international manufacturer of world-leading plumbing systems, including the innovative Speedfit push-fit plumbing system. Their pipes and fittings are used across the world, not only for plumbing but also for compressed air systems, drinks vending, automotive design and telecommunications.

Building on innovation

John Guest had been a family-owned company since it was founded in 1961 by the man himself, John Guest. The company was successfully sold to an Australian company RWC in 2018. The original values of respect and decency are very much alive today – along with the determination to run a company where the quality of product and excellence of service underpins everything.

John Guest came to Rooster with their need to develop a selection of technical tool and assets for their sales team to utilise. This original need spanned into a selection of different projects targeting different audiences, both B2B and B2C.

House tour video guide

We created a digital room tour, which gives domestic plumbers the ability to use interactive schematic diagrams to explore information on domestic products. This helped to build the user journey that has placed John Guest at the pinnacle of customer satisfaction. All stages – from product discovery through to purchasing – are seamlessly integrated.

Developing sales tools

Rooster created two web applications for the sales team to use: one to find a local sales agent and another to find a local stockist. Both use postcode lookup and radius targeting to show which sales agents are closest to the user’s postcode. This tool was essential for John Guest’s sales teams. Alongside these tools, we developed a custom microsite as part of a European product launch for the ‘Universal Connector’. The site was developed in order to promote and showcase how the product works, for audiences in the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany.

Vox pops

As part of market research, we wanted to gain a better understanding of the key competitors for push-fit plumbing. We wanted to know what sources or websites tradespeople use to keep up to date with industry news or for day to day business. We carried out vox pop interviews that comprehensively explored the connection between Speedfit and John Guest – and we were able to clearly establish which websites and sources tradespeople used frequently for their business.

We key identified competitors and assessed their strengths and weaknesses, with key insights into branding and the importance of product placement. We discovered how tradespeople rated other John Guest products, what the brand was best known for and the most important product features. This information was invaluable for future marketing.

Website and SEO

Rooster created fully mobile responsive, multi-regional and multilingual websites, built using an open-source CMS. We’ve been working closely with John Guest for many years on SEO for their Speedfit range. In that time, we’ve spearheaded long-term technical and content-driven SEO strategies that have improved site speed, user experience and discoverability. Our on-going content backlink strategy has helped raise the profile of John Guest as a leader in the industry while assisting in gaining more authority for the site.