Moving again...

Its been a long time since I posted on this blog.  The main reason being that I have been working on a big project to set up my own company.  One of the main reasons that I think writing down your thoughts is important is that it forces you to have thoughts, to order them, to generate a point of view that would otherwise stay in pieces.  The thinking and learning I did here have played no small role in getting to a place where I believe I have something new and exciting to offer as a business.  It has its own blog here. So if any one makes it to this page please make you way over there, and I look forward to hearing from you,

Best,

David

Awesome idea to make every road a power plant

This idea to make roads out of super tough solar panels really captures the imagination.  One of the big problems for getting renewable energy ideas off the ground is that they create an obvious impression on the landscape and there is a highly vocal minority who usually manage to convince councils to block promising projects.  'We are not against renewables, we just don't want them in our back yard' is the usual argument from people who have detected the slightest whiff of an impact on house prices.  Now someone has had the idea of making solar panels look like something big and ugly that for some reason causes less of an uproar with middle England... roads.  Whats really interesting is the ways they could create advantages over conventional roads such as ingtegrated lighting panels allowing better visibility.  This would give the ability to change road markings to alert drivers to possible hazzards making them safer.  They could also mean less road signs which are also pretty ugly.  Maybe if they managed to disguess other renewable energy projects as a branch Waitrose or 'good local schools,' then there could be even more sell in : )

Seen here...

Brand retirement

Most companies think about dipping their toe into sustainability by launching an eco brand. The logic is pretty straight forward I suppose i.e. ‘if theres money in this green trend then a new product launch would be the best way to attract it.' But might it be a more powerful marketing tool to do the opposite. To resign to retirement a product or brand that you think is sat on a business model that can't adapt well enough to compete in future more enlightened market places. Companies are not generally very good at counter intuitive thinking because it means backing the less simple, harder to argue option. When 100 people or more need to buy in that’s not easy to pull that off.  

It seems that GM have decided to off load the Hummer which has become short hand in recent years for environmental recklessness and ignorance. 500million is the price quoted. I am not sure if that’s a lot of money or not in the scheme of things but imagine the message it would send if they simply decided to hold their hands up and say they have decided to send the hummer brand into retirement. How much fun would it be to work on the marketing brief for that.  It would be a bit like when George Bush stood down.  We didn’t agree with what he stood for and it was a bit late in coming but we can wave him off with relief and just a little fragment of sentiment.  

I think a good example of dead wood would be airmiles as rewards for frequent flyers. Give regular flyers special treatment and try and make the pain of business travel a little more bearable but don’t give them tokens to fly even more; a well meaning idea that has had its day. On a personal level I have a small build up of air miles from Air Berlin and British airways. Consider them now publicly retired from service. Maybe there is a business idea in that. A retirement home for airmiles that would collect them off conscientious executives and give them to charities for some of the handful of others services that they can be used for such as visits to British tourist attractions that the average executive would not themselves use.