Entergy Corporation - Marketing Phase I

Entergy Corporation is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, and it is the second-largest nuclear generator in the United States. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.7 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $10 billion and more than 15,000 employees (Entergy, 2011). The mission at Entergy since 1913 is to generate safely clean, reliable, affordable power for their customers. The new product that the marketing team is introducing is solar energy. Solar energy is offered to customers as a form of electric power. The idea is to invest in a system large enough to receive solar energy to provide solar power at a low cost to customers within the service area. The customers will incur upfront costs to setup solar power to their homes, but the cost will result in a gain as the cost of energy rises and the cost to produce solar energy systems reduces.

Marketing Plan

Solar energy is a renewable resource. Using the power of the sun, solar energy systems can create electricity. Power plants use large amounts of nonrenewable energy resources to supply homes with power. Solar energy does not damage the environment therefore it is good for the future of the planet. Using solar energy would be a huge advantage for homeowners and businesses. Despite the growth in the solar industry over the past decade, it is still a small market, and the numbers of companies that invest in solar power for their business is very small. There is a large variation from country to country, and even from state to state in the United States (Hampton, 2008). Entergy's target market would mainly be companies that sell high tech products and companies considering going green. Providing solar power to these types of businesses would align with the sort of products they sell. Entergy would like consumers to know that using solar power would be more beneficial down the road and help cut down the cost of monthly expenses for both homeowners and businesses. It has been proven that using solar power creates a healthier environment. It is less stressful, and this is helpful to people's mental health.

Importance of Marketing

Entergy is a popular company in the southern parts of the United States. Offering solar power would not only be an advantage to consumers, but also for the company as well. Because solar power offers so many advantages consumers would benefit so much from this service that they would help increase the sales. For those businesses and homeowners going green using solar power would help to support the environmental protection. Some more good news for homeowners and businesses is that solar power is not restricted to just the sunniest states. Entergy wants to offer solar power to customers in the states that they are currently servicing and also expand to other states such as sunny California, South Florida where there seems to be a large amount of solar activity, and parts of Phoenix which are becoming heavily solarized.

There is a rise in the solar industry. Entergy will be able to provide customers with quality solar products at highly competitive prices. On the environmental front, the use of solar power for electricity reduces the amount of pollution that generating plants have to produce. This is, of course, a topic of current interest, with the widespread belief that fossil fuel use is contributing to global warming and the demise of the planet. The wonderful thing about solar power is that it is a renewable energy source, and will be available for ever, for all practical (human) purposes, unlike oil or coal which become increasingly used up with each passing year (Schmidt, 2010).

SWOTT

A SWOT analysis on solar energy is conducted to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths of solar energy are a free energy source, it saves money, it is environmentally safe, and global warming is reduced. Weaknesses of solar energy are the expensive setup costs, and the large amount of space that the systems occupy. The opportunities of solar energy include the ability to reach rural areas, low to no fuel costs and the health and safety rewards. The threats that are associated with solar energy