Synopsis: Maintenance Coatings — Channel Expansion
Our client had a maintenance product category that could be sold almost anywhere. Their traditional channels were industrial supply and consumer mass market channels. Over the years they had tried several different product strategies to grow their sales to industrial and commercial accounts and contractors. None were very effective. As such, the asked QDI Strategies to help them assess the market and develop growth strategy options for them.
QDI’s research was based on understanding both the behavior and the structure of the market. QDI’s consultants learned about market behavior by interviewing a cross section of customers from each market segment. The focus of our research was to understand the type of work they did, their usage of our type of product and their buying behavior – the shopping process and where they bought. This identified a key channel that the served the contractors that our client had a very small position in.
The next question was to understand the size of each of these segments and the products they used. This research was conducted using secondary research on product categories, census data on wholesale and retail trade. We then build a model of the market that linked these findings back to what we had learned from the end-user research. This enabled us to size the market potential for our client and their product lines through the new specialty channel which the research had identified.
The final research step was to reach out to specialty channel members and learn about how they managed their businesses and what our client would have to do to grow / gain share in their businesses. While we learned a portion of this market was unavailable because of competitive ownership, the majority was open to our client’s product lines, assuming our client’s overall offering – product lines, sales support, economics, etc., all made sense. Thus, our research at this phase focused on the business and programmatic requirements necessary to launch and support our client’s products through these channels.
Having identified a potential channel strategy that would significantly grow the business, the final step was to work with the client to help them identify who the key channel players were and to develop the program elements required for a successful rollout.