The message being put out on a grand scale by the residential solar energy industry does not seem to be winning the hearts and minds quite like we had hoped anymore.
The days of systems “selling themselves” have long since passed and that ship has sailed in all of the mature U.S. markets that have had rebate programs. The message that has hastily replaced the “save the world, be green” and other environmental and moral-based messages has been one mired in complex financial terms and solar industry jargon- tax credits, ROI, kWh, PPA.
Our big problem? Solar is actually NOT simple, unlike many of us have been trying to fool ourselves. I went to college to study physics, electronics, thermodynamics, and engineering to help bolster my drive to truly understand how solar energy worked. If we expect that all of our potential customers need or even want to have that level of sophistication in order to close a sale of a solar energy product- plus understanding of all the new complex financial terms we are throwing around- we are going to have some serious problems growing our industry and creating all these green jobs everyone is getting so excited about.
The way many of us have been programmed to market and sell solar energy has led us into a collective cull-de-sac. It is technology-focused as opposed to solutions-focused. Our marketing materials show shiny solar panels glinting off of roofs. Our proposals talk about brands of equipment and model numbers.
Homeowners that I have worked with in the past haven’t spent countless hours comparing the power curve of SunTech panels to Evergreen or compared inverter efficiency of an SMA product to a Fronius. In fact, to them, these technical matters are beyond them. So why do we as an industry continue to push technology-based sales and marketing to our potential customers? We set up a process that immediately alienates those we are trying to serve and puts a mountain of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that we then have to scale between us and a closed sale with a prospective customer.
Instead, the prospect, alienated by the technobable, tries to focus on the thing they can understand: what’s the price? This is where we set ourselves up for the second mountain to scale. The mountain of the tens of thousands of dollars rises in front of us, like the grand vision of Oz, and we try to keep the prospect from focusing on that man behind the curtain while we ramble about rebates you might qualify for if your home has this value or if your solar panels are x% efficient and tax credits if you have sufficient liability…blah blah blah. They’re already lost.
Think about some of the most influential products and services that have revolutionized the modern world: electricity, the automobile, and the Internet. When any of these items first came in to being, they were not immediately accepted or even needed. Someone had to create demand for them. The job of marketing is to create demand for a product – and sometimes a product that we don’t know we need or with a value we do not understand. This is where solar energy is now.
Much like the first few Model T Ford vehicles, it is a curiosity some have maybe heard about, but few have any direct experience with. And, more so, you had to have the smarts and/or resources to repair that car when things went wrong. Just think, though, to own a car now, we don’t have to be a mechanic and know what every part under the hood is. We need to know how to operate it. This is where we want solar energy to go. But how do we get from the early adopter Model T owner to the “Sign-and-Drive” of solar?
Market Research and Focus Groups
There’s no way around this one. Our industry needs some solid market research done to help us frame effective value propositions for our customers. Up until now, we have haphazardly guessed that the rebates and tax credits were the bait on the line to bring us prospective customers. We have guessed what our demographics were and guessed what their pre-conceived notions of solar energy are. We need to throw out these notions NOW.
Women and men respond to different messages, and in different age groups it gets even more complicated. Married or partnered people work through decisions in a different way than folks who are single. The biggest problem with how solar energy is being marketed now is that it treats all these demographics as if they are a just one big group of “people interested in solar.” The messages are not targeted, they don’t resonate, and they are not working. We as an industry continue to draw to us only the people who have already decided that they are ready to purchase and now want to compare contractors and prices.
In order to generate new demand in more markets across more demographics, we need to generate different messages that resonate with more diverse buyer personas. How are we going to achieve this? Through various instances of market research- surveys, contests, focus groups, and analysis/evaluation of our marketing activities. These are the most scientific tools we have in marketing to test messages, to learn about objections our potential customers have and develop messages and re-test messages to help remove these objections. Investments in these processes will help us learn the most effective ways to reach new demographics and through what channels.
Originally posted at my blog on RenewableEnergyWorld.com