If you haven't please just watch this first - and enjoy being truly blown away!
And then maybe come back and find out what this has to do with energy management.
If you watched the video - you just saw something unapologetically value-laden, energetic, smart and you grasped the point in around 40 seconds - the rest after that was just pure warm fuzzy stuff.
And the pure warm fuzzy stuff was the whole point (Drinking Guinness with your mates) is about caring! - That is pretty astonishing stuff in the masculine world of the beer commercial.
I hope that those words fit kWIQly too - Energetic (kW), Smart (IQ) and fast, and value-laden, but it's not the point of this post...
You see, I am following up from my post on the value proposition of an energy manager which was prompted by William Mougayar and am prompted now to post this by Arnold Waldstein who describes himself as Market & Business Strategist, Wine Geek and New Yorker (and unapologetically so).
This post is about: How you as an energy manager need to position yourself in the mind of your clients and colleagues. You see one of our roles at kWIQly goes beyond deciphering the energy waste message from energy meter data, and into the area of simply being as helpful as we can to energy managers. After all our job is simple - it is simply to delight you, by saving you time energy and money.
So when a new (to me) management concept picks up, I feel I should share it with the managers I know. Yesterday William and Arnold exchanged notes on the idea of "positioning". The idea (in my words and subject to my limited marketing knowledge) is this...
"Positioning : is where you put your message, in your clients brain"
So Guinness have previously had a clear win with positioning themselves as, a fine Irish Stout, that was prescribed to my Grandmother by her doctor (really - Esther was a fine God-fearing woman - who drank a half-pint of stout every day for her constitution!).
But now they are: The first Beer people to say trust matters, sticking with mates through thick and thin matters and being paraplegic should not matter (by the way every Briton I know was proud of the Paralympic Games London 2012 - which I trust has opened the floodgates of acceptance Lets hope the LA 2015 Special Olympics can achieve something similar).
So, as an energy manager, how do you position energy management or conservation ? (which is by definition your proposition - ie what they want from you) - There are choices. Money (the most important operational overhead after payroll), Carbon and Climate Change (The #1 issue for your grandchildren) , Energy Security (#1 cause of Wars) or perhaps something to do with corporate compliance (yes, tedious but it is a winner when it comes to budgets)
Perhaps, you need to structure your positioning slightly differently for different audiences - senior management respond to emotional triggers just like you do (but money is a bit of a pre-occupation), colleagues also buy-in perhaps for more emotional reasons (e.g. respect for the comfort needs of other colleagues) and as an all encompassing position, the carbon issue is at least notionally held as important by pretty much every company.
It is important because: if you can be the person who puts energy as a priority into peoples minds in your organisation - you will be a number one as an energy manager.
They will remember it (firsts are always easier to remember when compared with - yea wasn't he the guy who did energy management after Jean introduced it)
Doing this (establishing your ownership of brand authority at work) makes explaining your value propositions easier, the costs and risks are be more readily justified, and the response to "soft" energy management issues like awareness campaigns will be much clearer.
As for kWIQly - our positioning is gaining clarity (with much appreciated help from William and Arnold) - Yes we want to be fast, energetic and brightest in helping you as an energy manager do your job, and be the first in our industry to really delight you, but what we want you to really remember is that kWIQly is the fastest way to find waste.
So when you have memorized that (bookmarked, shared, commented, emailed yourself with a reminder and so on - do then feel quite free to enjoy a Guinness this evening with your mates !
thanks for reading - James
