Sell it the way it’s built

Reading your materials from the outside, two things stood out above everything else. The machine that surrounds an installer once they’ve said yes (the direct model, the named rep, the servicing income, the ring-fenced data) is genuinely excellent. And your strongest brand writing is hidden from the people it should be winning: your clearest identity statement sits in a loyalty email to installers who have already bought, your best pitch lives only in the sales team’s phone script, and your most premium proof, the Land Rover film, is parked in the archive.

What a cold installer, the one you’re still trying to win, meets instead is close to the reverse: a threat headline, a piggy bank, and “low prices” stamped on top of the most premium product in the category, with ten different ideas competing at the same volume. Your own numbers suggest the cost: installers open the emails but rarely click through. The living room, I’d expect, pays the same cost: an installer who has half-absorbed “ATAG is the cheap direct one” is left without a confident answer to “why not a Worcester?”

My recommendation is one governing idea at the front: ATAG is the best boiler for your customer, and the best partner for your business. Everything else demotes to proof beneath it. In the living room, the story is value: not the cheapest boiler, but the best one at a fair price. In the trade, the story is partnership: the merchant’s cut reclaimed as the installer’s margin, and servicing data ring-fenced so the income from every install stays theirs. The discount voice retires, while the mechanics that convert (the flue offer, the reward points) stay exactly where they work. And the idea gets agreed before the brochures are rebuilt, so the rebuild happens once.

Once an installer has said yes to ATAG, the experience around them is first-rate. Two pieces of that experience deserve to be seen rather than listed.

That “recommended by our plumber” phrase matters. Those reviews suggest the installer’s word is how ATAG reaches most of the homeowners it wins, which is why so much of what follows is about what the installer is equipped to say.

Then there’s the part I didn’t expect to find: the strongest brand copy in your files is filed where a cold installer will never meet it. These are the four clearest examples.

Here are the surfaces most likely to reach an installer who hasn’t yet said yes: the postcard on the mat, the manual in their hand, the portal every call-to-action points at, and the public bios.

Three patterns run through these surfaces and the wider library they come from. First, a premium product presented in a discount voice: a piggy bank and “SAVE £ HUNDREDS” sitting on top of an 18-year warranty and the most efficient boiler in Europe, with “Premium” and “Low Prices” sharing a single black bar. Second, ten-plus ideas competing at the same volume. The postcard alone stacks seven co-equal benefits, and your own team has already spotted this one: the sales script warns reps in bold, “Do not ATAG feature dump,” and your working notes conclude “less email comms… the better… this will help the marketing emails penetrate better.” Third, a complete kit for convincing installers to buy, with almost nothing to help them sell: among 43 pages of creative there is not one homeowner-facing asset, and the manual built for that job opens by telling the installer the boiler barely matters.

The email numbers are where the cost shows up.

The detail inside those numbers is worth a pause, and it’s better shown than summarised. Here are your cold sends, ranked by what actually earned the click.

Read the chart honestly: the gaps are small and nothing clears the target, so the personal note at the top is no triumph. The signal is the order. Fighting on equal terms, a named person edges out every anti-merchant argument, the offer trails them all, and the one attempt at thought-leadership was dropped. Two more cuts point the same way: on the warm side, the best clicks in the whole dataset came from the humblest sends (“we’ve improved; we miss you”), on lists small enough to call directional; and when you A/B-tested the ATAG name itself in subject lines, its presence made no measurable difference. My read of the ranking, the warm sends and the name test together: what conviction exists follows a person, and the name isn’t yet carrying an idea.

That finding doesn’t undercut a premium story; it supplies the story’s other half. The data suggests who does the convincing: your rep, the name at the bottom of an email, and above all the installer standing in the living room. What’s missing is what any of them gets to say.

Put sections 1 and 2 side by side and the problem is one of ranking, not substance. Nothing is wrong with ATAG’s facts, product or model. But the strongest and most ownable things ATAG says are reserved for people who have already bought, while the weakest frame (threat, price, not-a-merchant) fronts every cold surface.

Beneath that framing problem sits a deeper, structural gap, and it’s the one I’d rank highest. Everything in the kit answers “why should an installer buy ATAG?”: margin, servicing income, the moat. Almost nothing answers “what does the installer say to the homeowner?” So one of the hardest moments in the whole journey, a homeowner asking “ATAG? Never heard of it. Why not a Worcester?”, arrives with nothing in the installer’s hand and no line in their mouth.

That moment lands hardest on the installer who most needs help. A rough cut you can judge better than I can: some installers love the craft; others fell into the trade and are simply running a business. If that split is real, the second kind won’t manufacture conviction from scratch. They’d need the brand to do the convincing for them: a ready-made line, and a guarantee that covers them if the recommendation goes wrong. Today the one document written for them opens with “you are the product”, an idea that flatters the first kind and leaves the second exposed. My guess at what follows, one the section 7 conversations would test: the familiar Worcester or Vaillant wins by default, and “the customer preferred it” becomes the polite cover story.

Here is the governing idea I’d put at the front, drawn from language and proof you already own.

Treat the line as a test every surface must pass, not a headline to print. Printed, “best” invites “says who?”; held as a yardstick, it disciplines everything beneath it, because it’s a bar the product can defend in a living room: the most efficient boiler in Europe, the longest warranty in the category, a heat exchanger you can drive a Land Rover over and guarantee for life. What each surface prints is a proof-line of its own; in the section 5 mock-ups the postcard leads with “built to outlast its own guarantee” and the homeowner leave-behind opens by answering “never heard of it”, while this sentence appears on neither. The lens chooses the headline; it never is the headline.

The first half, the best boiler for your customer, is the weapon for the living room, and it’s a value claim rather than a price claim: the best boiler on the market at a fair price, built to outlast its own guarantee and cheaper to run for the decade it hangs on the wall. The second half, the best partner for your business, is why the installer trusts the first half. You sell direct, so you can’t sell around them, behind them, or against them, and the servicing income from every install stays with the installer who made it. Recommending an unfamiliar brand is a risk they carry personally, and ATAG takes most of it off them: a warranty of up to 18 years standing behind the recommendation, a technician on live video for a partner’s first install, and a named rep who answers when something goes wrong. Your own selling manual says “you are the product”; this line completes the thought. Under this lens, ATAG’s job is making the installer the most convincing person in the room. The product story gives them the words; the partnership makes the words safe to say.

Nothing gets deleted: every idea gets a rank and a job

A governing idea works by demotion, not deletion. Every headline you run today survives; each one simply stops competing for the flag and takes up the job it’s actually good at.

Which means letting the piggy bank go

This is the move I’d expect to feel like the biggest wrench, so let me be precise. Keep the flue offer and the loyalty rewards: they convert, installers like them, leave them alone. What retires is the discount voice: “SAVE £ HUNDREDS,” the cash-stuffed piggy bank, and “Premium Products · No Merchants · Low Prices” as the face of the brand. A boiler is a once-a-decade purchase a homeowner worries about, and my read is that in that room, cheap reads as risky: whatever attention the piggy bank wins at the letterbox, the brand pays back with interest in front of the homeowner. The discount stays something you do; it stops being who you are.

One note on ownership: I’ve assumed the lockup and the piggy bank are ATAG UK’s own marketing devices rather than anything Ariston mandates, which would make them yours to retire. That assumption is worth a one-line check before anything changes. Either way, the logo, the blue and the typefaces stay exactly as they are.

Everything below is illustrative, built to show the move: react to the direction, not the copy. Each rebuild takes a real asset from section 2 and re-ranks it under the lens.

Rebuild one: the selling manual

The manual is the one document whose entire job is arming the installer for the living room, yet for the installer who fell into the trade, “you are the product” is the opposite of help. The rebuild leads with their confidence and puts the words in their mouth.

Rebuild two: the winter postcard

The postcard is ATAG’s cold front door, and today it carries the section 2 patterns on one card: the threat headline, seven co-equal bullets, the piggy-bank voice. The rebuild keeps the offer and gives the card one idea.

Rebuild three: the missing leave-behind for the living room

The manual helps the installer speak; this gives them something to hand over. No such asset exists today, and the living-room moment is where one is needed most.

Every fact, offer and channel from section 2 is still on the page above, just re-ranked, with the discount working the till instead of fronting the brand.

The competitive field is the shortest argument for leading premium. This is a sketch rather than a market study, but the lane that matters looks open.

As far as I can see, nobody is claiming the genuinely premium boiler at a fair price, sold through the trade. ATAG can, and section 4 already stacked the proof; none of it is puffery, and the best piece of it is on film.

Four other directions: two absorbed, two set aside

This wasn’t the only direction on the table; I worked through four others. Two turned out to belong inside the line, and two I set aside.

First, the sequence.

The brochures are already being rebuilt, and that timing is a gift. Agree the governing idea first and the rebuild happens once, behind one idea, rather than beautifully reprinting ten competing headlines. The cheapest moment to fix the front of the funnel is before the next print run, not after.

Second, the honest soft spot, and how to close it.

Leading on premium is the one angle you’ve never tested; every other lever in your marketing has been A/B’d hard. I won’t dress that up: you’d be backing a direction with no data behind it yet. Two things make the bet rational. The territory is genuinely unworked, so whatever upside exists is still there to find. And the test is cheap: ten honest conversations with installers to find the language that lands, then the winning version run against your current control, the way you’d test anything else. Those conversations would also settle a question I couldn’t from the files (which kind of installer dominates your base), and the answer should keep sharpening the idea long after this document.

Third, tidy the numbers behind the flag.

As one idea takes the lead, bring the proof-points into line behind it. Today the merchant’s cut appears as £590 on one surface and £644 on another, and a premium brand can’t afford a wandering price claim. Nothing here is structural; I’ve passed a short tidy-up list to Kieron separately.