The Tech World Goes Green: A Case Study

Slowly but surely, the world as we know it has begun to shift towards a more environmentally-friendly society. From an increase in recycling and composting to political leaders taking action, we have started making progress towards saving our planet. One aspect of this process includes clean technology, also known as cleantech. Cleantech encompasses all efforts involving improving efficiency in technology to reduce its negative impact on the environment. In 2007, VantagePoint Capital Partners (VP) developed a goal to position themselves as a leader in the cleantech industry. To do this, they developed a public relations campaign to raise $1.25 billion dollars towards cleantech.

Research through focus groups and interviews showed that the cleantech industry held extremely valuable economic opportunities for VP. Research also uncovered different ways that cleantech impacts the world as a whole, which was valuable in the creation of content for VP’s campaign.

This is a video from their campaign. The purpose was to show the impact of cleantech on the world and to persuade viewers to invest.

VP’s objectives included securing feature coverage in one high-profile business media outlet, which would position themselves as a leader in the cleantech industry. Additionally, VP wanted to increase coverage of their role in cleantech and raise $1.25 billion dollars to support cleantech.

In order to communicate with their audiences, VP distributed press releases to various firms and had their top businessmen interact with the public. Additionally, they increased their digital presence by developing website materials and creating social media accounts. They also created a cleantech conference, created materials for investors to highlight the opportunities that surrounded cleantech, and worked with political candidates who were committed to cleantech.

VP achieved their objectives of positioning themselves as a leader in the cleantech industry as well as increasing their media coverage. The CEO of VP was very popular with the press and was asked to serve on several high-profile councils focused on climate change. VP was also mentioned in several prominent news outlets such as New York Times, Forbes, Time, and Wall Street Journal. However, while VP had great success in raising money and purchasing shares in cleantech in the beginning of their campaign, as time went on investment in cleantech collapsed by almost half. This, along with lack of investors, forced VP to end their efforts to raise $1.25 billion.

This is the CEO of VP during the 2007 campaign, Alan Salzman.

Overall, I would classify this campaign as a success. While they did not meet their financial goal, the opportunity to get the VP name out into the public is also extremely valuable and they did this with great success. In order to have met their financial goal, doing more research on the demographics of their target audience would have been helpful. VP heavily utilized social media, which was helpful for reaching entrepreneurs, but did not reach key investors. Reaching key investors was one of their main strategies to achieve their objective of raising $1.25 billion, therefore using a communication method catered to their key investors would have been more effective.