One of the great things about solar conferences like the Greentech Media Solar Summit is that there are a lot of veteran solar marketers eating breakfast in one spot. With a little cajoling and coffee, you can gather them together and ask them to share their insights on a live Periscope video.
This year I coaxed Tony Clifford, CEO of Standard Solar, Yann Brandt, president of Americas for Conergy, and Jim Callihan, Intersolar North America’s director of sales and marketing, into a live Solar Marketing Think Tank interview over croissants and caffeine. While they digested, I asked them one big open-ended question:
What’s missing from solar marketing today?
For Clifford, the missing piece for commercial/industrial solar marketing lies in the time and resources it takes to educate commercial customers who are leaning toward solar, but just aren’t there yet. When you have a multistate business with so many different types of commercial customers, the variables can be overwhelming.
Brandt said that solar companies need to share more information and best practices with each other, noting that a competitor could stand over his desk and read his emails, and he wouldn’t worry about it. It’s all about how you execute on that information, not the information itself.
Callihan believes that in order to scale solar marketing all the way to the homeowner, the industry must use the Internet to communicate more to residential consumers in ways that we’ve not figured out yet.
The full video of the group interview is embedded below (our apologies for the Periscope low-resolution quality). Although I’ve summed up their comments in this post, there’s a lot more insight in the video, so press play now.
from Impress Labs on Vimeo.
Tor “Solar Fred” Valenza is the chief marketing officer of solar at Impress Labs. Follow him on Twitter at @SolarFred and @Solar_ThinkTank.
