Sexy Solar Panels: The Branding Gap

I was glad to hear that solar made it into Obama’s speech earlier this week, but solar is finding itself lumped in with some strange bedfellows, nuclear and now even natural gas. How did that happen? Sometimes the story of a product or technology is all in the marketing. The success or failure of a product may depend less on the ultimate merits or utility of a product but more on the consumer’s perceptions of that product. In other words, it depends on what consumers think they see, not what they actually see.

You may have heard the story about the Patagonian toothfish—oh, you haven’t? That is because what diners order in restaurants is not Patagonian toothfish with its less than tantalizing name, but Chilean sea bass, thanks to a purposeful relabeling of the unattractive toothfish. The Chilean sea bass conjures up images of a delectable meal, rather than a fight to the death with the toothfish in the deep seas.

Now the labeling wars have come to the energy market. Obama has recast his energy policy from bolstering “renewable energy” to “clean energy”—and lo and behold, natural gas falls under this new formulation. You’ve just go t to love these new labels, which may cause one to wonder why gas is “natural” and how coal can be “clean.” I wonder how many focus groups were convened and how many millions in ad dollars were spent to come up with clean coal.

In the solar industry, pioneers in the industry knew early on that purchasing photovoltaic panels was a nonstarter for the masses. Who would want photovoltaic panels on their roofs? Homeowners couldn’t even pronounce the word, let alone consider putting them on their roof. Solar is a major improvement over photovoltaic.

In the labeling battles, it seems in vogue to call things what they aren’t and if you can get in some alliteration, all the better for your marketing campaign. Clean coal is about as good as it gets. The two major challenges to adopting solar energy systems we hear most from customers are how the panels look and how much they cost. To get solar into the mainstream, then, we need to come up with a new branding effort. “New and improved solar” is not going to get us very far, but we need you to weigh in helping the solar industry to adopt a new nomenclature that will attract the masses. Think cheap solar, or eco-solar, or simply superb solar. The one that I like the best is sexy solar as in I just put some sexy solar panels on my roof this week.