How we identified coating applications ready to pay more for biomaterials

  • Case Study - Insight Solutions
  • Coatings Applications
How we identified coating applications ready to pay more for biomaterials

Is your company developing innovative, eco-friendly materials but struggling to find the right market fit?

Let’s dive into how we used extensive market reach to test premium pricing potential.

Key Questions

A supplier developing plant-based resins for coatings faced a key challenge: price acceptance. Which applications will pay a premium, and for what benefits?

They partnered with SpecialChem Insight Solutions to test market willingness to pay and identify top adoption opportunities, leveraging our paints and coatings community.

Is the market ready to shift to plant-based alternatives?
Which applications segment will adopt them, and why?
How much is the market willing to pay?
What unique benefits do formulators see?

Maximize your success with agile market exploration

The SpecialChem Coatings platform attracts more than 115,000 monthly sessions (1 million active projects annually), and 69% of our visitors are technical buyers of specialty chemicals and materials. This size and diversity across technical functions provide an excellent pool of target candidates to test the material’s market potential.

To quickly gather market feedback while keeping the supplier anonymous, we developed unbranded material content and shared it with our network of formulators via digital channels.

Presenting the material directly to coating formulators and technical professionals enables us to assess interest levels across various application segments. This approach helps identify the key coatings segments most likely to respond to specific value propositions or benefits.

Presenting the material directly to coating formulators and technical professionals enables us to assess interest levels across various application segments. This approach helps identify the key coatings segments most likely to respond to specific value propositions or benefits.

Fragment of gathered insights:

Top application segments

This extensive outreach provided valuable market intelligence, giving the supplier a clearer understanding of real-world industry perspectives. Our analysis included both demographic and behavioral insights from over 1,300 unique professionals who engaged with the material. 

Additionally, as a trusted partner for technical professionals, we can gather honest and unbiased market intelligence about their expectations and needs—data that a customer may be reluctant to share directly with the producer.

Furthermore, over 70 professionals participated in an online questionnaire to answer key questions. We then connected with these coating professionals to gather their deeper market feedback. Over 20 participants took part in one-on-one interviews, offering valuable perspectives. 

We are trying bioderived materials for waterborne coatings in our application (...) We have tested several renewable resins, including (...), and none of these products gave us the results we needed. If we managed to get the results (...) we want, I believe we may consider a higher price with a premium of 5% at most, over current material.
Coatings User Feedback

By integrating additional sources such as bibliographic research, promotional performance data, and identified market trends, we gathered more comprehensive insights.

As a result, the supplier was able to refine the bio-based material commercialization strategy using data-driven insights—something that would typically take years to accomplish with traditional methods.

Client's Results

The supplier validated initial assumptions, such as geographical trends, specific coating applications, and the types of companies open to bio-based materials in the short term. More importantly, they also gained new insights into future opportunities, helping them identify the next steps, including which specific grades and performance attributes to prioritize.

A unique human & digital research methodology

4 to 6 months to assess the market potential and get the first customers

At SpecialChem, we use our unique and proprietary market research methodology that combines digital techniques (data mining) and human-centric research to engage with targeted professionals, formulators,  converters, OEMs, and industry experts.

We create targeted digital campaigns that quickly generate hundreds of interactions with the new product profile. In a matter of days, our experts have a pretty solid initial market landscape.

The Benefits of our Approach

  • Direct access to the broadest specialized audience in the coatings industry: 9 million technical specifiers using SpecialChem annually
  • 100% anonymity with unbiased feedback
  • Faster time-to-market: our Clients save at least 2 years in new product launch
  • Increased certainty:  our Clients obtain direct confirmation of product-market fit
  • Huge cost and resource savings vs the usual ways to test a product
  • Identification of first customers / key partners with strong projects even before the official launch

Are you launching new bio-based alternatives?

Identify the best product positioning and connect with partners to uncover performance gaps, maximizing your commercial success.
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