Engaging Story

Gove Green used to target residential solar market. And that’s why I wrote my Persona Pain-Gain Map on this basis. However, Gove Green has pivoted our target market to the commercial solar market, aiming to attract small to medium businesses in Massachusetts.

 

The Engaging Story

 

Do you know that solar power is becoming a new fashion in Massachusetts? Yes. You didn’t hear it wrong. It is Massachusetts, not California or states from west coast. And it is the NEW fashion. Even though Massachusetts doesn’t enjoy the same amount of sunlight as California, solar power becomes very popular here. The reason is of course the high utility fees in Massachusetts that other states can’t compete with. Massachusetts is known as its long history of liberty and great knowledge. It has many top universities with many talents who want to change the world. Imagine you are a graduate from MIT or Harvard. You have a start-up company which has 15 employees. You rent a two-floor building as your office near Boston area. The business has just begun. Your idea got great attentions and you want to bring it to the whole world in the next two years. However, the high cost of electricity in Massachusetts has nearly caused the company to close the doors, especially during the phase that your company hasn’t made any revenue. You think of the problem every day hoping to find a solution that can cut your electricity bill while keeping the normal usages. This is a pretty common phenomenon in not only IT start-ups but also other businesses such as manufacturers in Massachusetts. One day, you hear a great thing called solar power which can bring your electricity bill down to half of it used to be. What exciting news! What’s more, this company called Gove Green has a special solar panel that can not only cut your electricity bill to half but also provide heating and cooling service at the same time. You now get an extra saving on the top of the 50% cut on the bill by installing Gove Green's solar panel. Now you can sit in your chair and relax and what’s more important, you can now focus on the development of your company, but not your utility bills.

Market Analysis of Gove Green

Gove Green is going to introduce a more cost efficient solar panel to the world. The company will start from Massachusetts and expand to the whole country after. The reason why the company wants to start from Massachusetts is that one Massachusetts has a fast growing solar market, two Massachusetts has several programs that rewards solar energy users and three the company has many good connections and resources here. Massachusetts’ final goal is to have 400MW of solar capacity and 270MW by the year 2017. In the last two year, Massachusetts has built 143.1MW. The available market is still big.

We have been through many discussions about which market we should go after, residential, commercial or utility. In residential solar panel market, Massachusetts has witnessed an explosive growth in last few years. The support from government is the strongest motivation in the market. There are more than 400 solar panel installation companies in MA. The real fierce competition comes from the third-party owned residential installations. These companies adopt Power Purchase Agreement to lease a solar system with the aim of making solar a more affordable option for consumers. Gove Green didn’t go after the residential market because we see the nearly saturation of the market and unfulfilled needs non-residential market.  

As long as we decided that Gove Green is going after the non-residential market, we started to look at a specific target market to go in. We analyzed some existing companies in the market. One kind of the existing companies is the big energy companies that control large solar project in the country, such as Nexamp, the largest privately owned solar power plant. Gove Green as a start-up energy can’t compete with these large company at the starting phase. We realize the opportunities in Rutland, MA because that Brendan Gove, the founder of the company, has many connections in the field. After analyzing the market there, we summarized a couple of target market. One major market that we are going to pursue is the business plazas in the area with several small businesses in each of them. There is one plaza named Rutland Plaza is going to be our first target. Another target market is going to be industrial parks in the area. Gove Green is going to be competitive in getting these markets because not only the innovative cost-efficient solar panel but also existing networks with some of the targets. We are also going to expand our market to other area in MA based on the same strategy. Along we are opening the market; we are also open to pivot the market strategy. For example, we may find out in the future that certain area has already installed solar panel; we may want to go to the property management companies that own buildings and rent to small business. Another pivot point I foresee may be the expanding to utility market. According to GTM Research and SEIA, the growth of utility market will be the next big thing besides the residential market and commercial market.

Can a company today survive on inbound marketing? Why or why not? What is the role of outbound marketing?

The answer to “Can a company today survives on inbound marketing?” will be “YES”. However, the accuracy of the answer should depend on what kind of product business is promoting and what goal the business wants to achieve by conducting certain marketing strategy. The influences of inbound marketing can’t be ignored. And under some scenarios, inbound marketing is more effective than outbound marketing. Based on the changing behavior of customers, businesses are realizing that rather than “push” their message to customers, “pull” customers to look for the brand will get higher returns.

Inbound marketing so far is like an “invisible hand” behind the scene. When customers are reading high quality blogs with useful knowledge online, customers may not think that the blog may be provided by a commercial good company aiming to convey the promoting information between the lines. We are in the era where people need to pay to get high quality information and knowledge. Once, customers find this kind of information for free, they will dig more into it. The promotion information hiding between the lines will be founded by customers. Customers won’t regard the company name shown in the article as the annoying advertisement which is same with others on newspaper side bars.  Inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing because it won’t let customers feel they are interrupted or manipulated by businesses. Under the influence of this “invisible hand”, the best situation will be customers telling their friends about the company and the using experiences. Recently, I just have an experience with inbound marketing. I was searching in the medical device market. I found this great article talking about the market size, market trend and problems with real data and good information. And in this article, I came across this company name “Stryker”, who is a player in the market. After reading the article, I went directly to check out the company. See the result! I am totally influenced by the inbound marketing.

Besides the advantages of inbound marketing, I want to talk about the practical utility of inbound marketing. I want to say that inbound marketing is a great marketing tool since it won’t require a great of money investment and it will reach the goal of expanding brand awareness. Working on my ETR business plan on Solar Panel, I consider the utility of inbound marketing as a market tool in introducing our whole new brand by posting renewable energy related blogs. Also, by coming up with some useful “keywords” tags, I can increase the visibility of the blog and our company. However, I started to think of the returns that I can get by going after this strategy. I see this strategy will harvest good result in a longer term by constantly investing in high value blogs and information and get customers to go word-of-mouth influence eventually. But whether it will help me achieve the goal of aggressively opening the market?  I believe that the answer will be “no”. This is when I think a combination of inbound and outbound marketing will be a good choice. Gove’s Green wants to build the market from zero up. The best way to open the market will be outbound marketing by pushing advertisements out on outdoor billboard, community newspapers and internet. Also, I will also conduct the inbound marketing going on at the side.

The role of outbound marketing is still important in today’s world. It’s hard to find a company only does inbound marketing and survives. The changing behaviors on customers’ side, preferring to go after products suggested from peer reviews or friends recommendation or discovered by themselves, stimulate the adoption of inbound marketing and lower the position of outbound marketing. However, there are also other changes that can’t be ignored; for example, people now spend more and more time on their smart portable devices. Many start-up companies focus on analyzing data and pushing mobile personalized commercials to customers. This new pivoted outbound marketing can help business effectively higher returns.