If you're going to disrupt or re-invent an industry, I recommend you give it a new name and launch that name through strategic PR, positioning you and your company as the leader of that new industry, like we did with ZEN.

Instead of becoming a solar company, we created a whole new market category for ZEN — ‘home energy’ — and called the company ZEN Home Energy Systems. In doing so, we became the self-proclaimed leaders of this exciting new market category. I sat down with the manager of my PR company to create media stories around the topic of home energy and I became the person all the journalists would go to for comment — and by default, this positioned me as the home energy ‘expert’!

We then used this as the platform to build the profile of the ZEN range of solar home energy systems. My goal was to build confidence in the brand, as the technology was very new at the time and still very much in the realm of ‘weird science’ for most people — so faith in the brand was going to be critical.

We reviewed manufacturers from around the world and pieced together who we deemed to be the best component manufacturers in the space at the time, settling on companies from both Germany and China. The challenge was to get them to agree to manufacture under our brand and to integrate the components into a system format, and there were certainly challenges in getting these culturally different countries to work together!

We needed to take what was fundamentally quite a complex product to market in an easy-to-understand format, so we developed four sizes of the ZEN home energy system that would power from one-quarter of the average home to all of the average home. We took care of the system quality and matching of components. All the customer had to do was trust the brand and quality standard we had set and then choose the system size that met their needs and budget.

The result was that we literally pioneered the modern solar industry in Australia. The company created an extremely ‘hot’ market in an environment that was primed for a product that promised home energy independence. We gave the consumer confidence in the product, which, when paired with a high level of service, enabled us to position ourselves as a premium Australian technology brand.

Following on from the rapid awareness we had created in the home energy category, tenders started coming out for ‘home energy systems’. No prize for guessing who won those tenders and who people turned to for comment! It's far more strategic to lead than to follow, so if you're disrupting an industry model, give it a new name, get on the front foot and lead the market.

And, as we saw in chapter 6, once your company is established, a key role of your PR agent is to work closely with media outlets to bring to your attention upcoming stories on the sector you're targeting so you can participate. This also allows for stories to be written where you have the opportunity to feature as the ‘industry expert’ for journalists to draw comment from. I was given the opportunity to be involved in the story and provide my ‘expert’ commentary on anything to do with energy in the home. The journalist would then bring the conversation back to our ‘new sector’ name and our products.