Why did they struggle to sell their coating binders in North America?

The Challenge

Is it worth expanding to the North American market and if so, how?

A large European supplier wanted to grow its business of coating binders by entering the North American market. Already successful in Europe in architectural coatings, they took their chances in this new region to growth their business. But after trying and investing resources, it ended in failure. The American market never showed any interest without knowing why and how to fix it. They approached SpecialChem to understand:

• What are the barriers to sell in North America?
• What should they do to be successful this time?
• How do American formulators see the product vs. Europeans?
• Initiate projects with companies willing to evaluate the binder

SpecialChem Insight Solutions

6 months to understand the American market and identify new applications

To collect direct market feedback in a short timeframe, we created and shared unbranded material concepts to our broad community of coatings formulators and manufacturers via our digital channels. We encouraged professionals to share their feedback and interviewed the most interesting profiles to get a deeper technical and marketing understanding. By combining additional insight sources including bibliography, promotion performances and online behavior analysis, we provided all the knowledge required to enter the North American coating market.

The Results

All they needed to know to enter the North American market

In 6 months, the project exceeded our initial estimations and assumptions:

• We validated a huge interest from the American market which we’ve never seen in our previous missions.
• We identified 16 partners willing to test the binders, and first tests were successful.
• We understand the reasons of failure: The brand name was detrimental to the perception, the marketing wording was misleading, especially on how to use the product in the target applications. There was a price barrier in a few cases, specifically when coating formulators didn’t want to improve their primer adhesion.
• We identified the key success factors: One binder clearly stood out and we collected the key benefits based on the nature of the binder. We refined the value propositions for each country to highlight the best benefits.

As next steps, we recommended to update the marketing documents according to the learnings and start educating the North American market through a multi-year digital campaign, especially to quickly get rid of the negative perception of this product range.

Testimonial

“Now we’ve got all the keys to unlock the American market, thank you!”

At the end of the mission the client had all the keys to unlock the American market for their coating binder. They immediately took corrective actions to update their marketing documents and brainstormed about a new brand name for the product, which was one of the first reasons of failure.