A colleague recently sent me an article from a British publication chastising U.K. cleantech businesses for using fluffy greenspeak to market their products. I don’t see many U.S.-based cleantech companies doing that, but the critique got me to thinking about the cleantech marketing don’ts I do notice regularly. My top five:

Unprofessional materials. Many cleantech companies are competing with gigantic corporate incumbents. Websites and collateral featuring quicksand-like prose and a design sensibility circa the dawn of the Internet are not going to inspire confidence in prospects who can already think of 50 reasons to stick with the status quo.

Unclear benefits. Cleantech companies often have supercool technology—but that’s no excuse to let the engineers drive marketing. Communications that focus too much on the product’s technical splendors and too little on what it does for users aren’t going to build a market.

Confusing technical explanations. Sometimes technical explanations are necessary, and when they are, they’re usually targeted at a technical audience. Companies often see this as license to dispense with clarity—“they’ll figure it out”—but technical readers are often the pickiest about precision.

Poor understanding of target markets. Sometimes we think people care about something because they should. Alas, they often care about something entirely different. Simple example: companies should care about reducing their electricity bills, but what if the people typically authorized to buy your energy-conserving product aren’t accountable for electricity costs? Marketing needs to speak to the intersection of what the product achieves and what buyers think is important.

Internally focused marketing. Cleantech companies are just joining the party on this one—all kinds of businesses wander off down the dead-end path of internally focused marketing. The problem here is not so much failing to understand target markets as failing to consider them. This happens when decisions about content, tone and style are based purely on the personal preferences of company leaders. Unless these leaders are the target market, the company may end up marketing mainly to itself.

We love engineers. We work with a lot of them, and appreciate their analytical minds and openness to well-supported suggestions. But engineers should not be writing marketing copy. Alas, in the world of clean tech (and sometimes other sustainability sectors) it seems they often do.

The result for most readers is a lack of clarity. Symptoms of engineer-driven copy include an overabundance of technical detail up front, inadequate explanations of complex technology and processes, and a failure to show benefits and results. This that can translate to a lack of credibility with the target market in number of ways:

• When you hit people with technical details right off the bat, many will give up trying to understand and go away.
• If you can’t explain what you do clearly and concisely, it may send the message that you aren’t quite up to the task of execution.
• If you don’t show people how they will benefit and what results they’ll see, you give them no reason to engage you.
• Lack of clarity is increasingly associated with greenwashing (see an earlier post on this).

Communications that are clear and credible explain the  solution and technology as simply as possible, keeping audience needs in mind; provide technical details and specifications separately from core messages whenever possible; and keep benefits and results front and center.