Cree Drives LED Awareness on CNN.com

LEDs continue to make news and drive revenues for distributors.  They made so much news this week that they were featured on www.cnn.com’s home page … with advertising by Cree on Monday, November 11th (Veteran’s Day).

And when you clicked on the ad it took you to

and the url for this site was www.creebulb.com, which is a domain owned by Cree.

And clicking on the “buy” took a prospect to Home Depot’s website to complete the order.

Some thoughts …

• It is nice to see a manufacturer building their brand, albeit at the consumer level, but knowing that there is spillover into the commercial / industrial market by gaining name recognition.
• Cree is being very proactive with their marketing and essentially building the product category for LEDs, at least from a consumer viewpoint.  They are also advertising on TV, on SportsCenter’s app and many other places … investing in the business.
• While many distributors do not desire to pursue the consumer market, are distributors okay with Cree proactively, and visibly, partnering with Home Depot?
• Where are Philips, Sylvania and others in promoting their LED offerings … be it at the consumer market or other markets (other than traditional salesperson deployment methods?)  I read an article recently that talked about the consumer LED market and the brands that were mentioned were Cree (with Home Depot), Lowes with Utilitech and WalMart (the article was talking about the price of LEDs with rebates.)
• Will Cree become the LED bulb of the DIY market (and are they supporting Home Depot in pursuing the small / mid-sized contractor market or the commercial market? – we don’t know if they are or are not)

As a distributor, does your company have a focused plan to build your LED market? If so, how can your manufacturers help?  If you are not dedicating resources to this, you’ll be the recipient of low margin business as LED projects get bid.  It’s also important to remember that this is a product category that will continuously undergo change / innovation, so continual training of your sales organization, or lighting specialists, is critical.

Have customers questioning the benefits of LEDs? Check out this article from Forbes, the venerable business magazine.  The conclusion was “Despite savings of this soft, LED lighting will only account for about 5 percent of all the technologies used in retrofit projects this year, estimates Navigant Research.  By 2017, however, its share will probably be 40%; it will pass the halfway mark by 2021.  One big factor is lower LED pricing, which is helping compress the payback periods.”  (and this article was mentioned in the International Association of Electrical Inspectors’ newsletter, so inspectors are well informed on LEDs).

Distributors should use a copy of this article as a sales tool (and they can highlight the LED supplier of their choosing as multiple are mentioned.)

And to provide a sense of how far Cree has come in a short timeperiod, we recently asked some distributors to name a number of LED fixture manufacturers other than the big 4 fixture lines (Acuity / Lithonia, Cooper, Hubbell, Philips’ fixture lines) and the first name mentioned was Cree, so for LED lighting, distributors consider their to be 5 “leading” suppliers.

Cree should be complimented for their energy and initiative (and no, they are not a client even though they are here in the Raleigh area!)

What percent of your lighting business is LEDs?