LeveragePoint Case Study

Grace Chemical used LeveragePoint to Successfully Introduce a New Product in Tough Economic Times

Laurie Andriate is Vice President & General Manager of Grace Davison Materials & Packaging Technologies - Americas. In 2008, as Chief Marketing Officer of Grace Construction Products, Laurie was instrumental in deploying LeveragePoint for Value Management to drive the W.R. Grace performance mandate to accelerate growth through innovative products. Recently, we had an opportunity to talk with Laurie about the impact of LeveragePoint on her business.

LeveragePoint (LP): Laurie, we’d like to begin by asking you to comment on the overall impact that LeveragePoint for Value Management has had at Grace.

Laurie: To appreciate the impact, you must understand our journey. W.R. Grace executives and marketing leaders have always recognized that a solid foundation in marketing will drive innovation and sustainable profitable growth. What we lacked in 2006 was a consistent, structured framework for developing marketing plans across all lines of business. LeveragePoint provided that framework, especially for understanding value from our customers’ viewpoint. Understanding value from the customer’s perspective was probably the single greatest failure mode with innovation at Grace – maybe at any company. What LeveragePoint really provided was a consistent approach to understanding the customer’s perspective, developing value proposition hypotheses, and then testing them in a disciplined, actionable way.

LP: So what were some of your specific challenges?

Laurie: Our greatest challenge was making better decisions around which business opportunities to pursue. Grace introduced LeveragePoint to help everyone prioritize opportunities representing the greatest value creation for the customer and the greatest return on our investment of resources.

LP: Can you share with us a specific example of how this worked?

Laurie: Yes, we’ve had many success stories. One excellent example is the launch of Bondera, a tiling system with engineered adhesive matting on one side and a bonding surface on the other. Bondera allows homeowners to tackle complex tile jobs quickly, without mess, and without fuss. Better still, the Bondera system eliminates so many steps that complex projects are usually completed within the same day. This is a game-changing innovation.

LeveragePoint helped us explore our Bondera value hypothesis using a very systematic approach to customer segmentation. The Economic Value Estimation Tool really helped us understand value offered to the DIY-er and really helped us with our positioning and targeting.

LP:Tell us a more about how the Bondera introduction. Was the launch considered a success?

Laurie: A major big-box retailer really thought this was a category winner, and they were quite excited about it. We did a test launch with 34 stores. Even with thin resources, we quickly moved from a few stores to their nationwide network, in large part due to greater efficiency in our marketing processes. Using LeveragePoint, we iterated through multiple segmentation and targeting hypotheses. Any project team member could go back in, review previous analyses, collaborate, add to, build on, and reiterate off of earlier work. Therefore, the outcome of this shared learning and doing environment was accelerated time to market.

Specifically, we iterated through value hypotheses of time savings, ability to complete a tile job in one day, and eliminating need to hire a contractor. LeveragePoint archived our thinking around these value creation hypotheses, permitting us to iterate and prioritize multiple options, and devote market test resources to only the most attractive hypotheses. Subsequently, LeveragePoint provided an efficient framework for using market feedback to even further refine our value hypotheses.

LP: Were there other benefits that LeveragePoint for Value Management provided to your organization?

Laurie: : LeveragePoint allowed us to institutionalize knowledge acquired from different parts of our organization. Without the ability to institutionalize our learnings on this project, we would have lost a great deal of time, and some knowledge would have been lost forever. Instead, we executed a reasonably painless transfer of the project from one individual to the next. Moreover, in many instances our institutional memory of the Bondera project resided only in LeveragePoint, since many of the players never directly interacted with one another. Under normal circumstances, this could have been a disaster, but thanks to LeveragePoint, it was merely a bump in the road.

LP: Thank you, Laurie.

Laurie: It was my pleasure.