By Melissa Baldwin and Mike Casey

Most clean economy businesses need to build profiles for both their company and individual members of their executive teams. Their reasons vary, often by where the company is in the business life cycle. We find a lot of our clients’ profile building needs clusters at these points: 

Cleantechers, below I share some first impression takeaways from Tuesday’s election results. I offer these through the lens of my time in politics (25 years) but detached from any opinion I have about candidates or political views. These thoughts are offered strictly from a communications mechanics perspective, with the hopes that it’s of use to fellow clean economy communicators in your work going forward.

This article was updated in November 2022 to reflect the most recent industry developments.

Video Marketing for the Renewable Energy Sector

We often hear from our clients and friends in cleantech that one of their biggest challenges is reaching and educating a wide and varied range of audiences. Whether it’s utility executives, corporate customers, policymakers or homeowners, an effective cleantech media communicator can usually get to a win, given the opportunity to sit across the table and have a personal interaction. But your team can’t be everywhere at once, and it can be difficult to reach these audiences at scale and educate them on your company’s value proposition. 

I had the pleasure recently of talking with Joseph Batir, host of the Energy Transition Solutions podcast.

Joe and I talked about:

- Why I’ve found that working in the private sector is easier than working in politics or the nonprofit world via more rationalized client motives (4:25).

- It’s also more satisfying from a client-impact standpoint, because “You cannot sit at an environmental group and regulate the coal industry into sustainability. Some industries simply have to go. They cannot be kept around. Some industries like cement making can be made much more sustainable.” (13:00)"

- How few clean economy sectors are new industries because they’re not directly disrupting incumbents (13:59) and how disrupted incumbents push back hard through our form of legalized corruption known as campaign contributions. They do that instead of just handing over market share and going willingly out of business (15:19) “The disrupted are constantly reacting to the disruptors and the disruptors must manage that with fewer resources than the disrupted have.”

- Why B2B companies’ default reliance on jargony content hurts their sales and violates the Richard Branson rule of narrative simplicity “Any fool can complicate something. It takes a master to simplify it.” (27:10) and why your marketing collateral should be able to pass the “supermarket checkout test” (29:50) because it accommodates the reality that humans make emotional decisions first in order to make a rationale decision (31:27).

Tigercomm talks a lot about improving social media strategies for cleantech companies to compete with incumbent fossil fuel interests. We’ve worked with a strategic SEO agency, Rampiq, for the past few years on our own site and are continuously impressed with the results. We’ve asked Rampiq to write a guest article explaining how clean economy companies can use SEO to boost brand recognition, sales, and the visibility of their products.

Cleantech executive teams are almost universally concerned with the impact of commoditization of their companies’ long-term growth. But if your product isn’t differentiated, then competing is just about winning on price – otherwise known as commoditization.

Digital Solutions for Securing Community Acceptance of Wind Energy – With Will Eberle of E.ON North America

This article was updated in June 2022 to reflect new developments in the industry.