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students on plumbing courses at Colchester Institute, for example,
include a city executive, a computer engineer with a Masters degree
and a £750,000 house in Ealing, and a redundant jet pilot.97

Despite the plumbing market being a seller’s market, a growing segment
of new entrants to the industry are women who differentiate themselves
by targeting women customers. As the Institute of Plumbing, the main
UK industry body, reports: ‘Quite a few of our female plumbers don’t
have to advertise at all. They get all their work from the other mums at
the school gate and they do their jobs while the kids are at school.’98

The UK experience is mirrored in the United States. Stephania
Alexander moved into the plumbing service business in the early 1990s
when the collapse of the Californian economy forced her to leave her
plumbing materials shop. In her first year alone of operating the Mr
Rooter plumbing franchise for Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas, Stephania
achieved sales of over $1 million.

A large part of her success comes from differentiating her business to
meet the specific needs of women customers. This means that when her
employees come to a customer’s door, they wear crisp, clean uniforms
and bring with them a Mr Rooter doormat to wipe their feet. Protective
equipment includes booties to wear over their shoes, carpet protectors
and work-mats. Her staff are trained to enter only the room which
needs attention, always following the same traffic pattern to and from
their truck, so that they do not interfere with other rooms. The package
is completed by up-front menu pricing to avoid any stressful quibbles
over mysterious ‘extras’, together with a guarantee on workmanship.

Stephania Alexander provides a good example of innovative
differentiation in a highly conventional industry sector. As she vividly
puts it: ‘Our attention to detail coupled with our sensitivity to the
needs of the customers give us a definite advantage over the
stereotypical “butt-crack” plumber.’99

market mapping Market mapping is a useful technique to examine
how competitors shape up to each in other in a market and to reveal
possible market gaps.

The market map in Figure 4.2 shows how the UK lunchtime eating and
drinking market might have looked to Pret a Manger’s founders, Julian
Metcalf and Sinclair Beecham, in the mid-1980s. The analysis describes
the market along the dimensions of eating in or out, and quality levels.