Improving consumer knowledge

César Navarro: We can say that 2014 was the last year of the deep crisis that has plagued our country, so that at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 we began to see the economy recovering.
From that moment on, market growth has been strong and sustained, being the largest of the main European countries with annual rates close to 6 per cent, although we are still far from reaching pre-crisis levels.
In recent months there seems to have been a certain deceleration, due in part to the political situation in Catalonia.

The construction sector is starting to recover gradually, the level of unemployment has dropped almost 10 points although it is still at high levels, but overall macroeconomic indices indicate that we can continue to expect higher growth than the European average. We are optimistic about maintaining positive levels, although somewhat lower than in the last three years.

Spain is a country where the DIY culture has always been well below the central European countries. But gradually we have been improving our "diyers'" skills, a result in part of the efforts we make as manufacturers and distributors in our sector to improve the information available to consumers.
The world of the Internet is helping us to make available to consumers a lot of information that allows us to develop the DIY trade.
For example, at the AFEB we have recently launched a campaign of tutorial videos by "influencers" that encourage and offer ideas to consumers for performing certain home improvement jobs, and that is reaching hundreds of thousands of homes.
Do it for me is a concept, let's say colloquially, that is common in Spain. We are still "arriving" at DIY.
On digitalisation there is great concern in companies to move quickly, and an example is the success of the strategy and digitalisation courses that we promote at the AFEB.
We are living in the middle of a tremendous technological revolution that is changing our lives drastically as well as the way we relate and behave as consumers.
However, my opinion is that the characteristics of many of the products in our industry mean that physical characteristics are more important…