Team EV World

By all accounts, the adoption of electric vehicles represents a paradigm shift from consumers’ automotive purchasing behavior as it has been established over the past 100 years. Yet I have to laugh when I read articles that suggest that American consumers will be slow to give up their internal combustion engines because of this entrenched behavior, as if it were rooted in some sort of subconscious attachment to gas stations, spark plus, and exhaust pipes.

In fact, several scholarly analyses assume that an enormous amount of effort will be required to push consumers over the hump associated with the transition from ICEs to EVs—or to any alternative-fueled vehicle. I watched a recently recorded hour-long lecture by a professor at the Sloan School of Economics at MIT, which provided a detailed treatment of the factors that would apply to engineering such a changeover. I recall that he used the metaphor of Sisyphus, showing how hard we would have to push our rock up the hill before it would go over the crest rather than to roll back down to us.

The lecture was fascinating, and it certainly packed all the academic rigor that one would expect from such an estimable source. His analysis was based mainly on the product features and benefits, and the marginal cost vs. marginal utility associated with each: gasoline savings, inconvenience of finding alternative fuel stations, and so forth. But it omitted one concept that I think is actually the most critical in the entire equation: Consumer purchase behavior is less rooted in the product in question than it is in our conception of who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Put another way:

We tend to buy branded products—even when they cost a great deal more—that are statements of our values—products that express to ourselves—and to our fellows—the kind of people we are now, and aspire to be in the future.

When I was a young boy growing up in the 60s, my mother and her friends wore mink coats when they went to their dinner parties. At a certain point, however, the spirit of who we were as a culture moved away from trapping and killing live, sentient animals for their fur. It moved away hard, and it moved away fast. After only a very short period of time, there remained only a very few women who, for whatever reason, didn’t get the message that people who wore real fur were deemed to be cold, sadistic killers. And these poor people were broadly regarded as pariahs—as so many Cruella D’Villes.

Isn’t it obvious that something similar is churning in our cultural bellies in 2008? Haven’t we all noticed that people are starting to regard Hummer owners in much the same way that people of the late 20th century regarded those few women who clung shamelessly to their minks? When you look around, you see that the world is starting to regard those who blatantly over-consume and over-pollute as selfish, degraded pigs.

I’ve made my life’s work out of helping my clients understand their target markets, position their products correctly, and address the unmet need of the markets they aspire to serve. But I really don’t think the world needs a marketing consultant to point out the dynamics as they apply to the adoption curve here. Given the availability of a modest, freeway-safe EV at a decent price with any reasonable range, they’ll sell like hotcakes.

Craig Shields
cshields@evworld.com
www.evworld.com

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