The market selection process for Helios at Lafayette was a collaborative and well thought out endeavor. Our team used an orderly process to determine interests and then convert those interests into criteria for a specific and opportunity-rich market segment.
The beginning of our market selection process involved an anonymous document providing all group members the ability to describe their passions, hobbies, and interests. As a team, we then looked at commonalities between our responses and came up with the following list of common interests:
- Sports
- Outdoors
- Traveling
- Indoor comfort and air quality
- Personal cooling systems
This list served to break the ice, but it didn’t provide our team with a clear idea of everyone’s interest in terms of energy related market segments. Therefore, a new document was created with six broad areas that usually come to mind when thinking about energy:
- wind
- solar
- storage
- transportation
- industrial
- buildings
We narrowed this list down to buildings and energy storage through a group vote, deciding that they were the most interesting market segments to explore.
However, these categories were still fairly broad. We once again utilized group collaboration, having all members determine and describe the principle thoughts that come to mind when thinking about energy and its relation to buildings and storage. The outcome was a great variety of ideas which can be seen in the word cloud below.
Collectively, we narrowed down the list of market segments to:
- Individuals wanting shelter and comfort
- Parking garages & lots
- Colleges
- Manufacturers
- Commercial
The last step before determining which market segment to pursue was to conduct an anonymous poll. The results of the poll are shown below. Based on these results, it is evident that an overwhelming majority of team members chose “individuals wanting shelter and comfort” as their preferred market segment.
This market segment is broad because nearly every single person in the world would like shelter and comfort. Therefore, we decided to narrow this market segment down to “individuals at the residential level who want increased control/customization over the climate within their shelter and have reasonable resources to implement home equipment changes.”