CraigShieldsQuestions.com

Sorry for the long gap in posts here. A friend and I have been working hard to set up a new website on the business aspects of renewable energy. I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up. Here’s some of the verbiage we’re thinking of using to introduce the site:

You’re an entrepreneur at heart. You believe in yourself. And you also believe that clean energy has a big future on planet Earth as it moves through the 21st century. Population growth—especially among Asian middle-class consumers, global climate change, peak oil, and international tensions are all conspiring to increase our world’s demand for clean, renewable energy. You want to be part of the solution.

We’re (URL), the fastest-growing website dedicated to bringing you the information, tools, and interpersonal connections you need to establish and expand your clean energy-based business.

Now that we know one another, let me welcome you, and show you what you’ll see here — in enormous volume — as the site grows over the coming months:

Reports and Courseware – learning tools and content aimed at providing cutting-edge insight into the most critically important trends affecting renewable energy businesses: changes in domestic and international energy policy, technical breakthroughs, stimulus package grants, government incentives to businesses and consumers, etc.

Information Exchange – Blogs and discussion groups aimed at posing and resolving questions associated with green energy products and services.

Investor/Entrepreneur Meeting Place - A forum in which the renewable energy investment community can connect with those wishing to receive investment capital – and vice versa.

Business clean energy, green energy, renewable energy

Fingers writes:

Craig, knowing that I have too much free time on my hands I like to go to this website for some intellectual stimulus AND a chance to earn some $$$ at the same time. This site is one of the better sites for the solicitation of ideas and solutions for a award. (They ask for WAY to many chemistry solutions, and not enough mechanical solutions in my opinion, but nonetheless…)

They have a challenge for a marketing problem that I thought you might be interested in.

To which I reply:

Wow, what a terrific idea this whole thing is!

As it turns out, consumer product marketing is not my thing; I play more in the B2B space, and so I really wouldn’t know what to suggest. But thanks for thinking of me. I’ll be sure to check this frequently.

Business incentive, Innocentive, innovation

I had the pleasure of attending a few hours of the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference held this week in Long Beach. My hat is off to the organizers, Dr. Menahem Anderman (whom I met — second from right in photo) and his fine team; they put together a robust, well-paced, content-rich event.

At a high level, my take on this subject is as follows, modifying the positions I took in my earlier writings on the EV adoption curve:

1) A worldwide shortage of lithium is unlikely to be an important gating factor in the migration to EVs. The industry most definitely has problems (see below) but that one’s not in the top 10.

2) There are literally hundreds of different chemistries within the Li-ion family alone, each wrestling to become recognized and ultimately dominant.

3) Our market economy and international IP protection processes force a situation in which the optimum Li-ion battery does not—and will never—exist. The people who have the patent on the best anode do not have the patent on the best cathode, electrolyte, separator, battery management system, approach to pack safety, etc. The EV world will have to content itself with some sort of hodgepodge of fair–to-good features.

4) Most importantly, there are many disparate ingredients that create an extremely complicated calculus re: the EV adoption curve. We live in a whirlwind of factors that have huge but unpredictable affects on both supply and demand. In particular:

Private capital cannot be reasonably expected to funnel billions of dollars into supplying batteries into a vehicle market to which the OEMs have made only dubious and vague commitments.

Even if they were financially healthy, the OEMs would still have to hedge their bets based on the uncertainly of the battery supply (among other things), creating any enormous Catch 22 with the point above.

Consumer demand makes this Catch 22 even worse. Of course, demand is largely a function of gasoline prices, but it’s also affected by the price of the vehicle itself as well as the range offered by various product options. Consumers absolutely will not pay a premium to buy a car that may strand them on the roadside.

Without a roadmap to which the federal government is completely and irrevocably committed — one that includes both “stick and carrot” type of incentives, like tax credits and especially increased gas taxes — it appears to me that this industry will limp along until we’re all hip-deep in the rising waters from the melting icecaps.

Business Catch 22, electric vehicle, EV, Lithium-ion batteries

As promised, here is the article I wrote based on my interview with Malcolm Bricklin.  What an interesting character he is. I tried to cover the matter fairly, though I’m personally deeply skeptical of the technology he’s proposing.

Business electric vehicles, Malcolm Bricklin, www.evworld.com

As you may know, I’ve developed a keen interest in electric vehicles. The company I own with a partner, www.evworld.com, is the largest website on the subject, and I also work on consulting projects for its sister company, EV World Associates, LLC.

Occasionally, I take on writing assignments that call upon me to conduct interviews with important and colorful figures in the industry. Yesterday, I spoke at length with Malcolm Bricklin, a very interesting and passionate character who, over the last 40+ years, has participated in many different auto-related ventures. When I got him on the phone for the interview, he told me (as if I were Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter at the Daily Planet), “OK, I’ll give you the story. And you’re going to break it.”

I’ll post a link to it when it’s up on the website soon.

Business, Science and Technology electric vehicles, Malcolm Bricklin

And one last business-related post before we get back to the things in life that ultimately matter more.  You may be interested in what some of the clients had to say, so here they are:

Hewlett-Packard

Unisys

Computer Sciences Corporation

Olicom

Litton

Best of luck. And again, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Business clients, positioning, results

So there you have it — the secret in a nutshell: understanding the true sensibilities of your target market. What and how do they think? What are they trying to achieve–at the deepest possible level–for which their existing tools and technologies are inadequate?

Simply position your product or service as the answer to the most accurately worded question of what’s keeping your target audience up at night.

Here are a few other very quick examples; just click on the links to see the answer that my team and I provided at the time.  What if the market perceives:

LAN software as a bottleneck?

In-house printing solutions as being cumbersome and slow?

Its mini-computers to have no value in a client/server environment?

Their IT department as being out of control?

Their centralize computing environment as being vulnerable to hackers?

Their top customers as looking for shared vision and commitment from them?

It’s burning money in its inventory procedures?

Its failure to keep pace with changing technology may have made it a sitting duck for its competition?

What if a client wants to point out that:

Its VARs need to be interested in the explosion of new technologies?

It can provide (sniff out) good sales leads for its dealers?

Good luck on this! And don’t be shy about writing or calling if you have questions.

Business positioning, target market sensibilities

Before it spun off its scientific equipment division, Hewlett-Packard asked us to generate demand for its line of protein sequencers (devices that determine the exact sequence of amino acids that constitute a unique protein molecule). Of course, this is a highly technical field-and thus the temptation, if someone were foolish enough to yield to it, would be to promote the product according to its technical specifications.

But interviews with the market reviewed, as they always do, the true emotional needs of the target audience. In this case, it was the hostility that protein chemists had for their tools. Ph.D.s would say, “The tools are so bad that it takes hours of tedious work just to get one reading. I can’t be creative and solve problems because my time is spent doing the work that should be done by the tool.”

We designed a campaign that echoed these scientists’ concerns back to them, heralding all the people who had won Nobel Prizes for protein chemistry: Linus Pauling and a dozen or so others. The message that so deeply resonated with its audience: Breakthroughs come to the people who have the right tool for the job.

The campaign generated leads for many millions of dollars of equipment.

Business, Science and Technology Hewlett-Packard, Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize, protein sequencers

When Dutch-headquartered Philips Electronics hired us to launch its 4000-series LCD projectors in the US, they were in the process of becoming the 37^th player in the market-each one with a product almost completely indistinguishable from its 36 competitors in terms of features. The Philips product was not the brightest, nor the safest (it sometimes burst into flames), nor the lightest in weight, nor the least expensive; it had won no awards and had received almost no positive press.

However, when we interviewed the market, we found to our surprise and delight that none of this appeared to matter much. Those responsible for sourcing large numbers of LCD projects to support field sales forces were much more concerned about supporting the overall quality of the sales presentation. Their goal was to help make their sales teams more effective by helping them feel comfortable in a role (public speaking) that was well known to make people very UNcomfortable.

So we built a series of campaigns around the dynamics of a presentation. We showed how a Philips projector with its ultra-long bulb life, its vast range of plug-compatibility, etc. was much more likely to result in a warm, distraction-free presentation environment-on in which the presenter could concentrate on his audience-rather than himself and his equipment.

Over a 12-month period, we generated more than 20,000 leads from interested, qualified prospects, and distributed these leads to a network of professional audio-visual dealers. Sales started to roll in.

Business LCD projectors, Philips Electronics, public speaking, qualified prospects

As promised, I’ll post a few examples over the coming day or so.  Here’s one:

Unisys had a unique software application development platform that builds quick and effective applications for retail banks–applications that strengthen the relationship between a bank and its customers.  At the time, IBM owned the retail banking segment in the US, though Unisys hired us to help them mount an attack on the top 250 institutions.

When we interviewed the target market about the use of IT, the main unmet need that banking executives articulated was in sharing information, in “coming together as a team” to use information as effectively as possible.

In response, we developed this piece chronicling the (arguably) greatest teams in history: the 1927 Yankees, the US 8^th Army in WWII, and the 1969 NASA team that put the first man on the moon. The promise? The prospect should call the 800 number and request a free white paper that will explain how his bank can achieve the same level of team greatness. He would see immediately how he can develop applications that will pull his team together, and share customer information effectively.

We got 137 out of the 250 banks we targeted (55%) to respond to the piece and request to see a Unisys account executive. Unisys closed several landmark deals, including a $11 million contract that was signed just a few weeks after the program was implemented.

Business Business, marketing, positioning, retail banking, Unisys