Marketing Light-Duty Electric Pick-Up Trucks

It appears that our client Vision Motors may have succeeded in securing the capital it needs to begin soon manufacturing its uniquely attractive design of light-duty battery-electric trucks.  That will mean an important new set of responsibilities for me.  Vision’s CEO Brooks Agnew and I have become friends and colleagues over the last couple of years, and Brooks has repeatedly asked me to act as the company’s chief marketing officer.  In fact, he’s often quipped during our phone calls, “Hey, Craig, I turned down someone else for the marketing job today; I told ‘em, ‘No, sorry, that position’s reserved for Craig Shields.’”  I’m flattered.

But now the time has come for action.  And in fact, this is the fun part: making the strategic decisions that will guide the company’s progress through the coming formative months: the brand identity, the PR strategy, the distribution channels for sales and service, and the strategy for selling to government, fleets, and early-adopter consumers in carefully chosen target markets. 

Yet once the strategic pieces are in place, the real work begins: the “blocking and tackling,” i.e., the execution that means the difference between success and failure.  I recall what one of my first clients in the early 1980s told me: “Businesses are like babies.  They’re fun to conceive, but hell to deliver.”

Since those days 30 years aqo, I’ve functioned as the core of the team that has popularized some pretty unsexy products.  3M’s “fiber to the desktop,” Sony’s “helical drive tape back-up,” DEC’s “sales operations management system,” and 3Com’s “boundary routing systems architecture” come immediately to mind. 

Here, we’re talking about something with so much more appeal: sustainable transportation.  This is the opportunity to transform the ways we move our bodies and cargo around the face of the planet, ultimately putting a spear through our addiction to foreign oil – a substance that comes to us at such a magnificent cost.  I’m stoked.