Case Study - Consultants

Market Research Consulting

The Client
Headquartered in Northeast Ohio, this innovative specialty chemical company produces and supplies technologies that improve the quality and performance of its customers' products in the global transportation, industrial and consumer markets. These technologies include lubricant additives for engine oils, other transportation-related fluids and industrial lubricants, as well as fuel additives for gasoline and diesel fuel.

In addition, this global chemical company makes ingredients and additives for personal care products and pharmaceuticals; specialty materials, including plastics technology and performance coatings in the form of specialty resins and additives. Our client's industry-leading technologies in additives, ingredients and compounds enhance the quality, performance and value of customers' products, while reducing their environmental impact.

This performance chemical corporation owns and operates manufacturing facilities in 20 countries, as well as sales and technical offices around the world. Founded in 1928, they have approximately 6,800 employees worldwide. Revenues for 2006 were $4.0 billion.

The Challenge
This global chemical company has earned a worldwide reputation for excellence by manufacturing chemical additives that are designed to make engine oils, fluids and lubricants work better and more efficiently. However, while they have an extremely high level of brand awareness with its direct customers -- which include the largest oil companies in the world, such as Shell and Mobil -- it doesn't have a high level of brand awareness in the minds of front-line consumers. So, when they came up with a unique program of several creative new merchandising concepts to help their oil industry customers sell more product to consumers, they wanted to make sure through solid research that the program would have an excellent chance for success before pitching it.

The Solution
The unique merchandising approach created involved a variety of visually creative and interactive Point-of-Sale merchandising ideas designed to help 'up-sell' customers to other products containing this chemical company's additives. For example, a customer wanting an engine oil change at a Valvoline Instant Oil Change location would learn through this concept about the importance and value of regularly changing of the transmission, steering, and brake fluids in their car as well -- and then presumably purchase the additional service for their car.

However, coming up with this set of merchandising concepts put them in somewhat uncharted territory, according to Ron Torch, President and CEO of Torch Group. "Never before had an industrial chemical company thought of marketing to their customers' customers," he said. "Plus, they didn't know exactly what to do with what they had developed -- how to maximize the concept's value to its oil industry customers -- because the company really had no one on staff with consumer market research experience." So they quickly turned to Torch Group for help.

While Torch Group had worked with this global chemical company for years in filling full-time marketing positions, they were also well aware of Torch Group's skill in providing just the right outside consultants and contractors to handle specialized marketing challenges.

"We connected them with a highly qualified consumer marketing strategist," Torch said. "He was the perfect fit. Not only had he worked in New York for 30 years with some of the biggest ad agencies in the world, such as McCann-Erickson, but he also happened to have another qualification that was perfect for this situation . . . he also had a chemical engineering degree."

This consultant created a comprehensive market research program to evaluate their new merchandising program concept. This process included focus groups to evaluate consumer attitudes of the program from a qualitative standpoint (what they thought of the program), and also used online surveys to thousands of people across the country as quantitative research to predict the success of their program by predicting how many people would likely purchase the extra services.

Not only did this market research help them refine and streamline their original dozen or so merchandising concepts down to some 8-10 concepts -- it also gave the company a variety of important research-based 'selling points,' to clearly demonstrate to their customers the vast potential increase in sales they could see by using this novel point-of-sale merchandising concept.

"Our client was very happy with what we brought to the table in this instance," Torch said. "We pride ourselves on filling a company's marketing needs, not just filling empty seats. In this case, we were able to quickly identify their need for consumer marketing expertise, and were able to provide them with an expert marketing consultant to fill that special need."

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