Marketing of Construction Services

Observations in the industry and a recent survey indicate that construction companies are anxious to improve their marketing activities. Literature regarding industrial marketing of consumer products is quite abundant, but has limited use in the construction industry. On the other hand, most of the few published works regarding marketing in the construction industry concentrate on design services as opposed to construction services. This paper discusses marketing principles and practices that could be applied by construction contractors. It reports on an exploratory survey of marketing executives employed by the ENR top 400 contractors, carried out to identify the existing marketing practices and analyze them by size of company, type of work undertaken, type of contract used, and the proportion of new clients versus repeat clients. Results support the need for an in‐depth study for the development of feasible and efficient marketing strategies for construction contractors.