A private mining and industrial materials company supplied raw materials to the paints and coatings industry, almost entirely as fillers. Fillers are a large but commoditized part of a formulation, and the company's leadership wanted to know whether its mineral expertise could earn a more valuable position further along the value chain, in additives, premixes, pigments or distribution.

The question was open in two directions. First, the company needed to validate its own picture of how paints and coatings are made and sold, and whether that picture differed across architectural, automotive and industrial end markets. Second, it needed a grounded view of where minerals are actually used, or could substitute for other inputs, in the additive and premix categories, together with the market size, competitive landscape, formulation requirements and critical competencies that each opportunity would demand. Leadership also wanted profiles of smaller, differentiated additive and premix suppliers that might be candidates for partnership or acquisition.

PP&A assembled a team of strategy consultants with industrials experience and paired them with a content advisor who had spent more than twenty years at a major coatings producer. The work ran in three phases over six weeks. Phase one validated and mapped the value chain for the three end markets, from mined and petrochemical feedstocks through resins, pigments, fillers, additives and premixes to formulators, distributors and end users. Phase two took deep dives into additives and premixes. Phase three focused on company-specific research in the areas the client flagged as most interesting.

The primary evidence came from a series of 60-to-90-minute interviews with former executives, technology leaders and chemists from across the value chain, including specialists in rheology additives, waxes for powder coatings and pigments, as the client had requested. Each expert was asked the same closing question: if they were a mineral producer, where would they invest?

To move from opinion to evidence, the team also built a dataset of close to 9,000 paint and coating additive products, grouped into eleven functional categories, and classified each by whether it contained mineral-based ingredients. That let the client see mineral penetration by category and product type, which minerals appear where, and which companies dominate each space. PP&A reviewed interim findings with the client mid-project and the emphasis of the final phase was adjusted accordingly.