Whilst attention this week in the double glazing industry is quite rightly going to focus on the new Consumer Rights Bill to be enacted later on this year, I want to revisit an issue that has been the cause of many debates since the start of the year. Triple glazing.

More specifically, I want to focus on this particular advert:

It’s all much of a muchness right up until the very end where they say they have an offer to upgrade, for free, to triple glazing. First of all, I doubt that they would give something like triple glazing away for nothing. Imagine if it was 20 windows and 3 doors. That would leave them with a lot of cash to find. So lets just assume it’s already been worked into their pricing matrix. But the more long term concern I have is the fact that one of the industry biggest installation companies is already doing the same thing our industry did decades ago and turning a potentially profitable product into a cheap and worthless one by offering to upgrade it for nothing!

Some people are of differing opinions. Some say that because Everest are actually talking about triple glazing, it will help stimulate demand for the product, or at the very least peak people’s interest in it and try and find out more. I agree – however since these ads have been on the air since January we haven’t had one single request for triple glazing at all! So either everyone where I live is skint or the ads can’t be working as well as we might have hoped.

The other opinion, and the one I tend to agree with the most is that when a new product is launched, especially one as highly engineered as triple glazing, we should be preserving it’s exclusivity and promoting it as a high-end upgrade to normal double glazed windows. Thus, giving us all a chance to command a healthier profit margin and a better chance for us all to make a good living out of it. Advertising it as a free upgrade is going to make that task a lot harder. That is why I do not agree with the Everest adverts above.

I am a firm believer that whenever a new product is launched, we should be using it to help sell our overall product portfolio and try and make some extra money out the endeavour.

Do you agree? Is Everest’s adverts damaging the chances of marketing triple glazing as a new high-end bolt on product? Or does the mere fact it talks about it at all good enough? All comments welcome in the section below.