The Owen Sound Festival of Northern Lights and Market Transformation

January 8, 2008

led bulbs, one step woward reducing energy demand in Grey and Bruce Counties The Owen Sound Festival of Northern Lights received a brief mention in the January issue of LEDs Magazine. The referring article provides a good overview of how LED lighting is helping many communities “green” their Holiday celebrations.

The article also provides an overview of LED technology and a look at it’s relatively short history as far as t consumer market is concerned. The part of the article that I think warrants further exploration of deals with the ideal of market transformation.

From the article
So what is this Market Transformation?

In each and every case, the displays, icons, landmarks and utility programs have increased demand and retail sales to consumers. With additional awareness and education comes greater consumer understanding, which in turn allows consumers to make conscious decisions on their own. It is a domino effect. Although we hear much talk about banning the bulb, the best ‘banning’ agent is you, the consumer, for without interest or sales, retailers do not carry products that do not or will not sell, thus closing the door to availability of obsolete technology. In 2003, less than 10% of holiday lights sold were LED and in 2007, less than 10% of holiday lights available for sale were incandescent. A complete reversal in 4 years, now that’s market transformation! As alluded to earlier, this is also ‘lighting’ the way for the interest and acceptance of general illumination products as consumers have become more familiar with LED due to products such as holiday lights.

Recognition in Canada is also given to western Canadian lighting wholesaler Brite-Lite and holiday decoration distributor Danson Decor, both who specialists in quality LED products. Brite-Lite supplies the commercial decorating, festival and utility markets while Danson supplies Canada’s largest retailers. Both have contributed to a successful Market Transformation process.

As you can see, Canada has made a major contribution and has played a significant role in the development of this market, from festival firsts and exchanges to technology advances and the development of and releasing the ENERGY STAR criteria for Decorative Light Strings. The industry is currently watching the progression of ENERGY STAR criteria for Solid State Lighting, so very important to assuring the energy efficiency and quality of SSL in general illumination.

The most important take-away from this quoted text should be “With additional awareness and education comes greater consumer understanding, which in turn allows consumers to make conscious decisions on their own.” This quote is an important part of describing the potential impacts of Market Transformation but there’s more to it yet. An increase in awareness and a decision to purchase “better products” by early adopters of a new product /technology is certainly important to initiating a market transformation. “Better products” it should be noted, could be measured in a number of ways, but most likely equates to some form of reduced impact through the reduction in resource use either at the point of production, somewhere throughout the product life-cycle or in the ease of reuse/recycling potential at the end of a products useful life. The real value in Market Transformation however comes to light when the consumer doesn’t really need to be educated at all.

Let’s look at that a little more… a number of educated (or influenced at point of purchase) early adopters buy into a new product with some reduced impact/environmental advantage. Quite often these products will carry some form of identifying mark such as Energy Star, Fair Trade Organic, or FSC certified. These purchases begin to shift market share to producers who have taken th effort to provide a reduced impact product. This shift in market share is going to help responsible producers grow and provide more products and services in future while traditional/non-responsive producers watch profits fall off. From here our, until now, unresponsive producers have basically two options- get in the game with a similar reduced impact product or continue their slide into obscurity in the market place.

Either way this is going to lead to an increased chance that the next customer looking to get a “new widget” of some sort is going to be purchasing a more responsible product when they get to the store.

Market transformation is truly proven effective when an unknowing consumer brings a product home and then happens to realize it has some sort of additional benefit beyond that which sent them to the store in the first place. This situation is becoming more and more frequent and will continue to do so as long as a certain percentage of consumers “vote with their dollars” and support greener, forward thinking producers and retailers.

Have you seen market transformation in action lately? If so please leave a comment below and share you story.

As a follow up to this article I am going to put together a couple more examples of Market Transformation at work in our community and some thoughts on how this idea can be more broadly (and rapidly) expanded across Grey and Bruce counties for the benefit of all.

To be sure you don’t miss the follow up article and a variety of other great stories here at theOwen.com you should consider taking out a subscription, it’s free, easy, and a great way to keep up with the issues that impact our common future.