Jones Blair Case

Alexander Barrett, President of Jones Blair Company was having meetings with the senior executives from across functions on the marketing strategy and improving sales revenue. There were multiple options that were suggested by executives but all the members in the meeting were agreeing on none.

US paint industry is a maturing industry and is divided into 3 segments (Exhibit 1) namely Architectural Coating, OEM Coating and special purpose coating with Architectural holding the biggest market share of 43%. The industry’s current sale is slightly over $16 billion is expected to grow at general rate of inflation for the next year. The main focus area of the case is the Architectural coating which accounts to a dollar sales of 12 billion plus with a growth rate of 1-2%. This means there is not a lot of scope for the companies competing for this market to grow, only way of growth is to eat into the share of others. Another issue the industry is facing is the demand is slowing due to improving quality of products. Now lets discuss competition. There are multiple players in the architectural coating market like big whole sellers like Sears, Wal-Mart etc. On the other hand in some areas there are regional players like Jones Blair Company who have strong hold in those areas due to specialization to the climate of the that area. Overall the market is not very good and there are a lot of M&A are happening. The bigger players are taking over the regional players who are under tremendous pressures to maintain profitability. By doing so the larger players are increasing their reach and improving their market share. The selling locations are mainly dominated by the private, controlled store brands (Exhibit 2). Other locations include paint stores and hardware stores. So, we can say that the big players are able to dominate most of the sales using their location, pricing, takeovers and distribution channels. Do-It-Yourself painters majorly govern the architectural