CI 2015 Brand Preference Survey Reveals Integrators’ Loyalties

Cross-section of integrators and others in installation space share their feelings on brands they use on the job. The results may surprise you.

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When we launched our first Commercial Integrator Brand Preference Survey and asked people in the integration space to tell us which company’s products they used and preferred in more than two dozen categories, we truly didn’t know what to expect.

We provided a handful of choices in each of the 25 categories for survey respondents to choose, but also left it open for them to fill in their own selections. For the most part, the write-ins earned 1 or 2 percent of a category’s votes, but in other instances, the write-ins cracked the top three, which clearly will help us shape the brand preference survey for 2016.

Many of the results you’ll see were likely fairly predictable based on a company’s reputation or word of mouth from your counterparts, but there were definitely a handful of selections that surprised us, so we imagine they’ll surprise you too.

For purposes of this analysis, we focused on the top three most mentioned preferred brands in each of the featured categories. We asked respondents to share their brands usage for the past two years overall, and indicate one “preferred brand” per category. In most cases, the top three in each category matched up, but there were instances where some differences emerged.

Check it out: CI’s 2015 Brand Preference Survey Results

What will be interesting to monitor as we conduct this survey in future years is how certain product categories fall out of the mix and other product categories — in some cases, products that few are really thinking about today — emerge as key parts of a job.

In case you were wondering, we did not break down the categories into vertical markets. However, when integrators share projects with us now it may be fascinating to track whose products they implement in board rooms, conference rooms, classrooms, sports bars, hotels, etc., compared with this data.

Surely, like most other surveys of this kind, these results will generate plenty of debate, and maybe it’ll get you to think in new ways about products or manufacturers you haven’t used in the past. Thanks to the 227 people who responded to our inaugural survey — let us know how you think they did (and if you didn’t participate, there’s always next year), and what we should change for the 2016 edition.

See the results here.

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