CASE STUDY · HALO BY ORTHENE
Launching a challenger
brand into a commoditised market.
How a 50-year-old private label manufacturer built its own motorsport brand from scratch, and had it adopted by one third of the Le Mans grid within two years.
50 years
PRIVATE LABEL HERITAGE
300+
CLIENTS WORLDWIDE
100+
BRAKE FLUID FORMULATIONS
2024
OWN BRAND LAUNCHED
THE BACKGROUND
A world leader that nobody had heard of.
Orthene Chemicals is the world's leading brake fluid specialist. For fifty years the business has operated as a private label manufacturer, developing, producing and shipping brake fluid for more than three hundred clients worldwide, many of them top tier automotive suppliers. The expertise was world class. The name on the bottle was always somebody else's.
Following a strategic business review in 2022, the company decided to develop and launch a brand of its own: Halo By Orthene, aimed squarely at professional motorsport.
Marketing Means More was brought in to help with the project in spring 2023.
THE CHALLENGE
Commoditised, ignored, and resistant to change
The brake fluid market has become highly commoditised. Even at professional motorsport level, brake fluid is usually the last thing race engineers think about when optimising braking performance. It is a box to tick, not a decision to agonise over.
On top of that came inertia. Race engineers prefer to stick with the familiar, tried and tested option, and are understandably unwilling to gamble on an unknown product when the stakes are a race result. A new brand had to overcome indifference and risk aversion at the same time.
1
DIAGNOSIS
Start with the customer, not the product.
The first stage was research: understand what race engineers and drivers actually needed, and where existing products were letting them down. Running alongside that, a full competitor review to establish who was in the market, what they offered, where they focused and what they charged.
One requirement came through clearly above all others. What mattered was low compressibility, sustained at high temperatures, because that is what delivers consistent pedal feel and braking response over a full race distance. And consistent braking gives drivers something they value more than any specification: confidence.
2
STRATEGY
One thing to stand for.
That insight around confidence gave the brand a position it could own, expressed in a single line that everything else would answer to:
POSITIONING
Halo P1 gives you the confidence to race as hard as you can from the first lap to the last.
It is a deliberately narrow claim. It does not try to compete on every feature. It takes one attribute that engineers and drivers care about the most, and makes it the reason the brand exists.
3
EXECUTION
A plan across all four Ps.
With the positioning agreed, the plan covered the full marketing mix, not just communications.
P
Product
Use Orthene's world class expertise and proprietary technology to develop a specialist racing brake fluid, named Halo P1, with exceptionally low and stable compressibility, supported by distinctive packaging.
P
Price
Price at a significant premium to the rest of the market, so that price itself becomes another signal of product superiority. Defend the price position and avoid discounting.
P
Place
Build a worldwide distribution network focused on specialist race parts distributors. Now more than forty distributors, across North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Asia and Australasia.
P
Promotion
Provocative advertising in key race engineering titles and websites, presence at international trade shows, social media for reach and engagement, and partnerships with leading race teams for technical data and endorsements.
THE CREATIVE
Strategy you can see in the advertising.
The positioning promised confidence from the first lap to the last. The advertising turned that promise into a provocation: Be last. Last on the brakes is the bravest place to be, and a driver only brakes that late if they trust the pedal completely.
It is a deliberately confident piece of work for a category that usually sells on specification alone, and always claims to make you win.
POSITIONING TO HEADLINE
"Confidence from the first lap to the last" becomes "Be last."
The strategy is not decorated by the creative. It is dramatised by it.
THE RESULTS
Present on the most important grids in the world.
Since its launch at the beginning of 2024, Halo P1 has built a growing reputation among professional race teams as a product that makes a measurable difference.
LE MANS 24 HOURS, 2026 · SHARE OF THE GRID
1/3
1/3
1/3
RUNNING HALO P1
TESTING HALO P1 THIS SEASON
EXISTING SUPPLY OR SPONSORSHIP DEALS
Indy 500
WINNER, 2025
Indy 500
WINNER, 2026
IndyCar Series
2025 CHAMPIONSHIP WINNER
IN THE CLIENT'S WORDS
"I've worked with Mike Biscoe for over three years, and he's been incredibly loyal — standing by my side through both the successes and the challenges of building the Halo brand from scratch in a highly commoditised market. Mike brings real professionalism, clarity and honesty to everything he does, constantly challenging my thinking and making sure we focus on what's truly distinctive.
Crucially, he starts with strategy, not tactics. Before developing any plans, Mike helped us decide who to target and what to stand for. He cut through the noise and got us focused on the few principles have made the brand stand out and win. I can honestly say Mike has been key to Halo's growth and credibility in a market that's saturated and filled with misconceptions. Thank you, Mike."
Lloyd Ker
CEO, ORTHENE CHEMICALS LTD (INCORPORATING HALO BY ORTHENE)
WHAT MADE THE DIFFERENCE
Three principles behind the result.
-
Research before strategy. The positioning came out of what race engineers and drivers actually said, not what the business assumed its product was good at.
-
Distinctiveness over features. The brand stands for one thing, confidence over a full race distance, rather than competing on every specification.
-
All four Ps, not just promotion. Product, price, place and promotion each reinfoce the same positioning. The premium price is a key part of the argument, not a obstacle to it.