If you are a marketing person in the chemical industry, the question of how-to and how-much is never far from your mind. I’m not talking about selling pesticides or drain cleaner to consumers. I’m referring to B2B chemical sales. Feedstocks, reagents, catalysts, additives, etc.
Management never likes to pay much for advertising and will always be skeptical of the value of ads. Yet, deep within that black heart most managers know that some advertising is necessary.
Sales to the public is demand that can be fairly easily measured. Sales in the public domain are open and lots of nifty and informative stats and trends can be compiled to help plot marketing strategy.
By contrast, sales of products that are not out in the open, or products that are part of a proprietary process leading to another kind of product are things that are somewhat problematic to understand. Products that are uncommon or are unique to a few limited circumstances are not products that you necessarily want to promote in the mass media.
If a company makes a bracket that is used to hold a fuel flow sensor on a 1998 Buick, chances are that the product will be useless for just about every other application. But many components on that same Buick are of a general nature and may be found on many kinds of cars.
In chemical marketing, many products are of a general nature and many are highly specific. The marketing approach for highly specialized products is necessarily more focused than that for chemicals of a more general utility. A specialized product requires that marketing people be like a Dachshund- these dogs were bred to go into burrow hole to pull out the critter that lives in there. Marketing specialty chemicals requires the same sort of proclivity.
Where do I find information about who uses what? I search patents, SciFinder (to see who is publishing with what materials), Google, and I talk to people about what they are looking for. Purchasing people always have a list of troublesome products. Your company should have a decent customer list to draw upon.
Another approach is to do a patent search starting with a particular company AND a key word. While there is absolutely no assurance that the company is actually practicing the art that they patented, it is possible to collect a list of companies that have used your product at one time.
Finally, there is the Johnny Appleseed approach. You simple plant literature at every fertile site you can find, and you do it several times with multiple media. Brochures, emails, cold calls, websites, conferences, and technical literature. “Technology Push” is hard work. Especially if the economy has taken a dive. It can take 3 months to 3 years for a potential customer to give you a call when they finally decide to make a query.
The marketing of obscure products is spotty business and hazardous to your wallet if you are on commission. The best circumstance is to have a portfolio of products, or a catalog. If your collection is good enough, something will always be in demand.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
I understand that few companies can afford the sales force that a large “sales push” requires, so many have entered into agreements with distributors, making the distributors a greater part of the process than just acting as a warehouse. What are your thoughts about this chance?
Hello Mr. Isocyanate,
I speak mainly from the smaller specialty chemical arena. Suppliers of chemicals that have commoditized- that is, multiple supplier, large sales volume of materials whose prices are severely-raw-material cost driven- find themselves in a position where the distribution of their products necessarily involves brokers or distributors. When a product graduates to this level, a distributor may have considerable self-interest in the promotion of high volume sales of these products. The distributor can’t always wait for the manufacturer to get with the program.
Some companies might say they “can’t” afford vigorous marketing efforts, but I think what this often means is they “won’t” afford it. Part of the cost of doing business is to plan for the cost of sales. Management that excels in the art of manufacturing may actually be absolutely incompetent in planning for the task of selling.
Selling chemicals often requires “technical sales” people. The problem with accumulating a technical sales staff is that they may be inbred with a strong technical background in the company, but not wise to the ways of marketing. To properly sell chemicals, you need a technical “rain maker”.
A techncial rain maker is a person who has the social skills to befriend strangers, the technical skills to drill into an R&D person, and the curiosity and drive to sniff out new customers. These are rare birds. Such business polymaths are worth their weight in gold.
To wrap up my answer to the question, I think it is crucial for any seller to take an active role in the market push of their products, distributors included, provided they have incentive. That manufacturers may be leaning on their distributors is lame and just an excuse to save money on the cost of sales. Manufacturers that expect their distributors to shoulder marketing duty should be prepared to cut a deal with the distributor to make it win-win.
I’m curious what you call a commodity. I think it’s easy to identify solvents, simple monomers, salts, and minerals as commodities. What about resins? I can see how in terms of volume they may look commodities, but in other ways they aren’t
I have a very narrow definition of what constitutes a commodity. I would say that PE and PP are certainly commodities. Products whose mfg costs are strongly driven by raw material costs are going to be products that have a relatively low labor$/kg of product component. Technology can reduce labor unit costs more easily than raw material costs. Commodity products are produced by continuous processing 24/7 to maximize the economy of scale. To be a player in commodities, you have to be able to produce high volumes of product to compete. Competition drives commodity profits to thin margins, so volume is the key. Once something has commoditized, it has strong competition for price and quality.
Specialty products, then, are products that may be produced batchwise or at least in smaller volumes, have a larger labor component to the cost, and may be part of a final consumer product that is a minor player in the market. They may have wider profit margins because the full force of market pressures (minimal choice in supply) have not been brought to bear.
Polymers like PLA are hard to define because demand is hard to gauge. Demand for PLA is not entirely utilitarian. There is an ethical dimension to the demand for this product. It is more expensive than PE, composite, or Nylon films, so consumers have to make a decision to pay a premium on the basis of abstract reasoning about ecological matters. No doubt, Cargill PLA is manufactured at the greatest economy of scale feasible to make a stab at being a rational choice.
My definition would that a commodity is bought on the basis of price. Something like 190 proof ethanol. It hardly matters where you get it from, one companies is as good as the other. Yes, we all have horror stories of cases where it did matter, but those are the exceptions. PE, PP, PET and others are largely bought on basis of melt flow index (don’t even get me started on the flaws of MFI), so I would also argue that they are commodities in most cases.
Hi John, indistinguishability is another attribute of commodities. Thanks for remiding me. In the polymer field the converters are a crucial group that serve as gate keepers of demand. While consumers may have some sensibility as to the physical properties of their rubber ducky, the converters make the decision as to what grade of resin to buy. Processability, torque, and extruded widgets/hr are areas of concern for processors.
It’s funny. We’re on different ends of the polymer industry, so we are like the blind men trying to describe an elephant.