Plumb Centre : Heat Mode: ON

Boiler sales up in a market going backwards.

Heat Mode: On is a six-month trade marketing campaign for Plumb Centre, the national heating and plumbing merchant. We built the strategy, the media plan and every creative asset in it. It beat every objective it was set, grew boiler sales in a market going backwards, and has been shortlisted three times at the Construction Marketing Awards.

Every merchant in the country goes loud in September. Stock, price, availability, all of them at once, to the same installers. Making the same noise slightly louder is how a heating season gets wasted.

Plumb Centre set three numbers for the winter.
Three million impressions, to be known as the place installers buy heating. Two hundred new trade accounts from sole traders and micro businesses. A 5% lift in sales volume across boilers, air source heat pumps and critical heating spares, measured against the same months the year before.
The money was the constraint. A modest media budget, six months to cover, and a brief that asked for commercial return at that level of investment.
One person. The installer in the van.
Plumbers and heating engineers running their own books. They buy on whether the part is on the shelf this morning at a branch they can get to, and they buy from people who sound like they have done the job. Everything was aimed at the catchment each branch can realistically serve.
One name for the season. Heat Mode: ON gave six months of separate messages a single badge, so a boiler ad in October and a spares ad in January read as chapters of the same campaign. The product story did the selling underneath it.
Machinery to hold it together. A components board mapped every placement, branch, app, web, print and feed, against budget and timing. A campaign workbook held UTM tracking, assets and copy in one place and ran as the hub for all three agencies, with an activity log and an issues log beside it. Concepts were mocked up as visuals before a word of final copy was written, so feedback came early and cheap.
A media mix built for the budget. Paid social, a TikTok test backed by a low-cost content day, radio, Google Shopping, Google PPC, email, in-branch and organic social.
Honest measurement. Halfway through, account tracking from paid broke. Cookie consent, page load and in-app browsers were losing sessions between the click and the landing page. We said so, moved the measure to applications started, which the back end captured in full, and told them to build a dedicated fast-loading Plumb Centre landing page to stop the leak. A campaign nobody can measure honestly is a campaign nobody can improve.
- Campaign strategy and the creative platform
- Media strategy and laydown
- Every creative asset across the six-month season, used by every partner on the roster
- Paid social for Meta, plus a TikTok test
- Radio scripts and production
- Google Shopping and PPC creative
- Email and CRM
- Landing pages, in-branch and print
- The campaign workbook and components board that ran three agencies from one source
As this is commercial sensitive, please contact angel@wearethealternative.co.uk for more info on the outcome of this project.
Three agencies worked on Heat Mode: ON. We built the strategy, the media strategy and laydown, and every creative asset in the campaign. BBJ&K bought the media. Cogent handled organic social and PR.
Somebody else’s verdict
In October 2026 the Construction Marketing Awards shortlisted Heat Mode: ON three times. Best Big Budget Campaign. Best Integrated Campaign. And Team of the Year for the Wolseley marketing team who commissioned it.
Judged by senior people from across the construction industry, which is the only jury that counts in this category. Winners are announced on 19 November.