How the Contractor Channel Is Evolving - and Why Tile Manufacturers Are Starting to Pay Attention

For as long as India’s tile industry has existed in its current form, the contractor has been the invisible hand in the purchase decision. A homeowner walks into a tile showroom. They browse. They are overwhelmed by the choice. They call their contractor. The contractor says “yeh lo — yahi achha hai.” The homeowner buys it. The contractor has just made the specification decision, without having signed a specification document, attended a product presentation, or had a single direct conversation with the manufacturer whose product they just recommended.

Industry research consistently estimates that 65 to 70% of building material brand decisions — tiles, cement, adhesives, sanitaryware — are influenced by the contractor, mason, or applicator at the point of installation. In the cement industry, that figure has been cited as high as 70% of brand decisions being driven by mason recommendations. In the adhesive category, Pidilite has acknowledged that tile adhesive penetration remains at only 20 to 25% nationally — a statistic that is directly connected to the mason ecosystem, because masons who have not been trained in adhesive-based fixing continue to specify sand-cement bedding regardless of what the manufacturer or dealer would prefer.

This is not new information. What is new is what some of the industry’s most sophisticated players are doing about it — and what the implications are for dealers who have historically assumed they own the customer relationship.

The Contractor Loyalty Programme: From Afterthought to Strategic Investment

The clearest evidence that the contractor channel is being taken seriously as a distinct commercial category is the emergence of structured loyalty programmes designed specifically for contractors, applicators, and masons — not for dealers, not for consumers, but for the people whose hands put the product on the floor.

Pidilite’s Roff brand offers the most documented example in the building materials category. The Roff Champs programme — explicitly described by Pidilite as a loyalty programme for tile contractors — has been running for several years and has been systematically expanded. The programme structure moves beyond the simple rebate or gift-on-purchase mechanics that characterise most informal contractor incentive schemes. It creates sustained engagement with the Roff brand through a points-based reward system, product training, and a tiered membership structure that gives higher-engagement contractors progressively better access to product information, technical support, and commercial benefits.

The strategic logic behind Roff Champs is visible in the results. Pidilite’s Consumer and Bazaar segment — which includes tile adhesives sold through the retail and contractor channel — grew 22.5% in Q1 FY27. Some of that growth is market expansion as adhesive-based fixing penetrates markets where sand-cement bedding was previously the norm. But a meaningful portion of it is share capture — contractors who were previously brand-agnostic between Roff, Laticrete, Ardex Endura, and Weber now have a specific commercial reason to specify Roff on every project where adhesive is appropriate. The loyalty programme turns a price-sensitive contractor channel into a partially brand-loyal one, which changes the competitive dynamics of the entire category.

Laticrete — the American construction chemicals brand with a significant India presence through MYK Laticrete — runs a similar structure through its Blue Premier Rewards programme internationally, with points earned per qualifying purchase, tiered contractor status levels, and exclusive training and support benefits. The Laticrete model has influenced how the Indian market thinks about contractor engagement, particularly in the premium adhesive and waterproofing segment where specification quality matters most.

In the tile category specifically, manufacturer-run contractor engagement programmes have historically been less structured than in adhesives. The more common model has been contractor events — product launches and demonstrations attended by contractors — and informal RSM-managed relationships where the field team maintains contact with key local contractors as part of their general market management. What is changing is the formalisation of these relationships into structured programmes with specific commercial mechanics, dedicated field resources, and tracking systems that allow the manufacturer to understand the contractor channel’s contribution to secondary sales independent of the dealer relationship.

Training Academies: Where the Real Strategic Investment Is

Beyond loyalty programmes, the more strategically significant investment in the contractor channel is in product and installation training. This is where the long-term brand influence is actually built — not through reward points, but through competence and confidence.

A contractor who has been trained on the correct installation method for large-format porcelain tiles — the adhesive selection, the substrate preparation, the levelling system requirements, the grouting technique — will specify those products on subsequent projects for one simple reason: they know how to install them correctly and they do not want the risk of a failed installation. Training creates competence. Competence creates confidence. Confidence creates consistent recommendation. The loyalty programme rewards the recommendation. The training programme is what makes the recommendation credible.

Pidilite has invested in contractor training as a category-building exercise — understanding that tile adhesive’s core penetration problem is not a product quality problem or a price problem. It is a knowledge problem. Masons who have never worked with adhesive-based tile fixing will not specify it regardless of the product’s technical superiority. Masons who have been trained on it, who have seen the difference in application quality and installation reliability, become advocates — not because they have been paid to, but because they now prefer the outcome.

Several organised tile manufacturers have begun investing in similar infrastructure. Kajaria’s approach to contractor engagement — particularly in the context of the builder account push that management referenced on the Q1 FY27 earnings call, as we covered in the Kajaria builder account piece — has included structured contractor engagement alongside the large builder account development. A builder who specifies Kajaria tile for a 500-unit project needs the contracting ecosystem on that project to be equipped to install it correctly. The tile manufacturer’s investment in contractor competence is therefore directly connected to its ability to win and honour project specifications.

The training investment is also defensible in a way that scheme incentives are not. A contractor who participates in a product training session and gains a skill they can use on every subsequent project has received something with ongoing value. A contractor who receives a scheme incentive for a single project has received a one-time commercial benefit that a competitor can replicate next month. Brand loyalty built on competence is stickier and more durable than brand loyalty built on rebates.

Direct Incentive Structures: The Threat to the Dealer’s Ownership of the Relationship

The most commercially consequential — and the most controversial — evolution in contractor channel management is the emergence of direct incentive structures that bypass the dealer entirely. A manufacturer who builds a WhatsApp group with the top 50 contractors in a city, sends them product updates, scheme information, and technical content directly, and tracks their recommendation behaviour through direct digital engagement is creating a relationship with the contractor that does not require the dealer as an intermediary.

This is not hypothetical. The digital infrastructure for direct contractor engagement — WhatsApp groups, branded apps, loyalty programme portals — exists and is being used. Kajaria’s AR visualisation app, which allows contractors and homeowners to visualise tile selections in real spaces before purchase, is a consumer-facing tool that also serves the contractor channel by making the specification conversation more visual and more compelling. When a contractor can show a homeowner exactly how a tile will look in their specific room on their phone, the recommendation becomes more credible and the conversion rate improves — regardless of which dealer the purchase ultimately flows through.

For dealers, this evolution creates a specific and underappreciated commercial risk. If a manufacturer can influence the contractor’s recommendation directly — through training, through loyalty points, through digital engagement — then the dealer’s historical role as the primary relationship that connects the contractor to the brand is being partially disintermediated. The contractor walks into the showroom having already decided which brand they want. The dealer makes the sale, but they did not make the recommendation. The dealer’s value-add in the transaction has diminished — and with it, their negotiating position with the manufacturer.

This is not yet the dominant model in India’s tile industry. Most contractor engagement is still managed through the dealer relationship, with the RSM facilitating contractor introductions and maintaining relationships on behalf of the brand. But the direction of change is clear. The manufacturers who are investing in direct contractor engagement now are building distribution assets that reduce their dependence on dealer loyalty over time. This is a structural shift with real long-term consequences for the dealer community — and the dealers who recognise and respond to it now are in a better position than those who notice it when the shift has already happened.

What Dealers Should Do About It

The honest answer to the question of what dealers should do about the contractor channel evolution is that dealers need to own the contractor relationship themselves rather than letting the manufacturer own it through them.

A dealer who maintains their own structured relationships with the top 20 to 30 contractors in their market — who has those contractors’ direct numbers, who calls them proactively when a new product arrives that is relevant to their current projects, who helps them resolve site problems quickly, and who they think of as a business partner rather than just a material supplier — is a dealer whose value-add cannot be easily replicated by a manufacturer’s WhatsApp group or loyalty programme.

The contractor who calls your showroom first when they have a new project tiling requirement is a contractor you have earned through consistent, personal, problem-solving engagement. The contractor who calls your showroom because the manufacturer’s app told them to buy from your brand is a contractor you are leasing from the manufacturer — and the lease can be revoked if the manufacturer decides to route their recommendation to a different dealer in the same area.

The Tier 2 city distribution model we examined in an earlier piece makes this point for smaller markets: the most durable distribution advantage in non-metro markets is the direct contractor relationship, not the showroom display or the scheme structure. That insight applies equally in metro markets, where the contractor channel is simply more contested rather than less important.

Dealers should also engage with manufacturer contractor programmes as active participants rather than passive observers. When Kajaria or Somany or Pidilite runs a contractor training event in your city, ensure your key contractor accounts are attending — and that they know you facilitated their attendance. A contractor who attends a manufacturer training event because your RSM called them and arranged it associates the knowledge they gain with your dealership as much as with the manufacturer. You become the local gateway to the manufacturer’s knowledge infrastructure rather than a bystander to it.

The Channel Is Changing. The Question Is Who Owns the Change.

The contractor channel evolution in India’s tile industry is not a story about manufacturers doing something wrong. It is a story about a market maturing — about an industry recognising that the influencer who sits between the brand and the end consumer has been underserved and underinvested for too long, and that systematic engagement with that influencer produces commercial results that informal management cannot.

Pidilite’s Roff Champs programme exists because it works — because contractors who are engaged, trained, and rewarded recommend Roff more consistently than contractors who are not. The tile manufacturers who are beginning to build equivalent infrastructure are making a rational commercial decision based on the same logic.

What this creates, over time, is a more complex and more contested distribution landscape — one where the manufacturer, the dealer, and potentially the contractor’s own digital ecosystem are all competing for influence over the purchase decision. The dealers who will thrive in that landscape are the ones who build genuine, direct, service-based relationships with contractors that neither a manufacturer’s loyalty programme nor a competitor dealer’s scheme can easily displace.

The contractor has always been the invisible hand. The manufacturers have finally noticed. The question now is whether the dealer community notices before the hand moves somewhere they can no longer reach.

How the Contractor Channel Is Evolving – and Why Tile Manufacturers Are Starting to Pay Attention