Analysis of a spin-off company marketing their product through supermarkets.
Conventional wisdom says you can't introduce a new product in the supermarkets without spending millions of dollars. So Brooks O'Kane launched a very old product instead
Sometime in May 1989 Brooks O'Kane got lucky. He doesn't remember the day, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that, in his fifth month as the first-ever marketing director for Lawrence Plate Glass Co. (LPG), of Lawrence, Mass., someone handed him a folder and said, "This is the file on our ClearVue glass cleaner. Why don't you take a look at it?"
What O'Kane found astounded him. Here was an unmarketed, thinly distributed product -- a largely ignored sideline to the company's glass business. It was scarcely available outside the Lawrence area: Lawrence Plate Glass carried ClearVue in its five New England glass stores and also sold it locally to auto dealers, jewelers, other glass shops, and a nearby supermarket chain. Yet the folder contained dozens of letters from people all over the country who were crazy about the product.
As O'Kane thumbed through the letters, he decided he had stumbled onto a marketer's dream. "The second I saw those letters, I knew this was how I was going to make money." Forget pushing windshields and mirrors. Here was a product that inspired such loyalty that people would go out of their way -- sometimes by thousands of miles -- to buy it. Why not sell it nationally?
The answer was simple: money and priorities. Walter Demers Sr. had founded Lawrence Plate Glass in 1918; by the late 1980s his son, Walter Jr., was running a 180-employee company with five locations in New England. Over the years LPG had diversified, and by that time, one-third of its revenues came from a subsidiary that made garage doors. Another third stemmed from construction projects. The remainder came from wholesale glass sales to contractors and auto-repair shops, and the five retail locations. While those divisions typically produced $18 million in annual revenues, ClearVue had had record 1987 sales of a whopping $62,000.
Not that ClearVue had ever benefited from a lot of attention at Lawrence Plate Glass. Sometime around 1950 Walter Demers Sr. bought the glass-cleaner formula for $500 from an inventor who sold the product from the back of his car. It was bought for in-house use, but soon the company began selling the colorless fluid in its glass shops, under the name ClearVue. The company hired a high school kid to mix up a batch in the back room on Saturday mornings.
Walter Demers Jr. remembers looking several times into seriously marketing ClearVue and always coming back with the same answer: introducing a consumer product on supermarket shelves costs big money. And Lawrence Plate Glass was a small, family-run business that didn't know anything about supermarket distribution and certainly didn't have millions to spend on advertising and promotion. So the product languished. "Quite frankly, it used to be a nuisance for us," says Walter Demers III, who manages one branch of the company and will someday inherit the rest.
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If Clearvue had always been a nuisance, Brooks O'Kane quickly made it a much bigger one. "Brooks is a fantastically persistent person," says Walter Demers Jr. "He eats, drinks, and sleeps ClearVue."
O'Kane, now 31, studied marketing in college, then went to work for a direct-marketing company. After a failed real-estate venture, he found himself looking for a job at the same time the Demerses decided they needed someone to coordinate the company's advertising and marketing. Besides his background, O'Kane had one key qualification for the job: he is married to Ellen Demers, one of Walter Jr.'s four daughters.
Unfortunately, O'Kane's hiring coincided with a drastic decline in the New England real-estate market. Since plate-glass sales are closely tied to the construction industry, Lawrence Plate Glass's revenues plummeted. (This year, after the sale of one division, company revenues will be about $12 million, down from $18 million two years ago.) With his advertising budget cut, Brooks O'Kane had plenty of time to work on a strategy for ClearVue.
Of course, he didn't know the first thing about the channels through which he might sell the product, and he was given no resources to do so. In fact, O'Kane's only real encouragement within the company came from Dave Berryan, LPG's controller. In the fall of 1989 the two men began plotting a new life for their glass cleaner.
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O'Kane's first step was to begin orchestrating a grass-roots marketing campaign, pitching his story to newspaper and magazine reporters. With persistence and a colorful story, he managed to get several articles written in the New England press. Those generated phone calls and letters, many from consultants who wanted to talk about their services. Even though he couldn't afford consultants, O'Kane made appointments to listen to them all -- to try to learn as much as he could about retailing. In some cases, vendors contacted him as well. And some consumers did seek out the product, a fact O'Kane hoped might carry weight with supermarket buyers. But he knew publicity alone wouldn't sell his product, so he pursued every possible sales lead. That meant working with everybody from a car-wash supply company to the New England St. Bernard Club. (According to one letter writer, ClearVue is unsurpassed at removing St. Bernard slobber.)
O'Kane's first big success was with PPG Industries Inc., a $6-billion manufacturer of glass and other products. PPG had been trying to expand the number of accessory items it sells through its 126 glass-distribution centers. Carl Tompkins, PPG-North America's manager of market development in branch distribution, tried and liked ClearVue, as did many of the marketing people -- and they especially liked the fact that the product didn't have general retail distribution. An agreement in principle was reached between O'Kane and PPG that the giant manufacturer would be the exclusive national distributor of ClearVue to the glass industry. O'Kane could keep a retail base, as long as he didn't sell anywhere outside New En-gland. If he broke that rule, PPG could call off the deal.
