Solar Pressure

An interesting report from a solar industry analytics company…

“The company developed a machine-learning model to sort out which factors were most salient in predicting [a domestic rooftop solar panel] installation, using an impressive data set that included mutual-fund investment, interest in the outdoors and ‘high-life behaviour’. Among all these, [by far] the most likely predictor of having a solar panel was having a neighbour who had installed one.”

I’d imagine that if you talked to the average owner of a rooftop solar panel installation they’d waffle on about saving money (over time), energy independence and even ‘making the planet a better place’. However no one would suggest that the solar panels improved the look of the place; they’d go silent on that one.

And yet, it’s all about keeping up with the Joneses.

They call this ‘peer pressure’. Having never thought about the expression before I guess it is the pressure to conform to what ever the neighbours have done.

Having said that I am sure that the peer effect is broken up into two broad groups on a Gaussian distribution; those that want to keep up with the neighbours (those that feel peer pressure) and those that want to create the pressure on their neighbours in the first place (the early adopters).

Every strategic marketer must knows this. New product introduction would be all about identifying the early adopters and giving them all the incentives they need to fuck with their neighbour’s heads.

Assuming all the folks just want to fit in as much as each other, the early adopters must just calculate the risks and rewards of early adoption just that little differently.

The benefits of being first must carry a weighting factor for that internal calculation of ‘belonging’ that outweighs the odd failure (where none of the neighbours follow their lead).

I can feel a multiple choice questionnaire coming on, resulting in everyone getting a score out of ten on the ‘Peer Pressure’ index.

’10’ for the absolute early adopters (that probably built their own solar panels rather than waiting for them to be commercially available) and ‘0’ for the last person in the street to adorn their roof with the aesthetic blight of out times.