Do your consumers trust you?

This morning, as my kids were watching TV, I observed my wife struggling to cut what looked like a bar of gritty soap. When prodded, she told me it was the dishwasher pellet which she regularly cut because she learned that they were exaggerating the amount of detergent that you really needed to do a good job.
Basically what she was saying is that she figured this out and many people may not yet have. Like the “repeat” instruction on the shampoo bottles, this was simply done to sell more soap. You didn’t really need that much, but they wanted you to go back to the store for more in a shorter time. Is that brilliant marketing? The shampoo people think they are clever. Short term maybe…long term I believe not.
We face the same issue in solar. What do you really need? Are we being honest? To those two questions I would dare say that few are being told the truth, both about what you need and about what you are getting.
November 1st. A new brand is launching in the solar world that will capture the hearts and minds of its consumers because of its brutal honesty. It will be a long road, but it will win in the end. Thankfully we have the backbone and support to ride it. Already a number of our major customers have signed up for 2006. But it usually takes appealing to a party who is ethical and wants integrity and respect to be the hallmark of their company’s brand. Certainly there are some for which only the short-term gain is important. If they don’t feel their customer includes those values in how they judge their company, then they are not likely to buy into this kind of approach. We’ll kindly respect their decision and agree to walk away. It won’t be for long. Already two major retailers returned to ICP as a vendor-partner this year because they figured out for themselves what we had been saying was the truth all along.
Back to the detergent analogy. We manufacture a solar panel for Winnebago rated at 10Watts (true max power actually closer to 12watts due to improvements), yet we have been pushing 15-18Watts as the need for a medium sized RV…why? Because, like other solar makers with similar technology, its more profitable to sell a full plate than to cut it. We get to sell you more watts than you need for that application. Just like shampoo or diswashing detergent, you are sold on more than what you really need. That ends November 1st. The anticipation is killing me, but it will be well worth it.
Trust..something that is hard to win but harder to win back.
Sass
PS. An interesting blog entry in Seth Godin’s blog about who we trust the most..