Earlier today, Terry blogged about footling around with the API on our Fronius inverter which is hooked up to our solar panels. For him, the ability to live tweet how our solar panels are doing was a massive plus when deciding which inverter to install.
I confess this was one of those occasions I admitted that his technical expertise & enthusiasm had vastly outstripped my own and so I just let him get on with it. So I had no idea that, as an extra marketing strategy, Fronius has a line of merchandise given away as a thank you to their customers. A couple of days after the install, the lovely Paul from Sims Solar popped round with the certificate for the Feed In Tariff, the instruction manual & some swag!
But this was no ordinary swag! This was actually useful. I got a mug, an in car phone charger & a metal disk the size of a pound coin which magnetically fits into a holder which fits on a key chain: the kind used for accessing supermarket trolleys so you don’t need to worry whether you have a pound coin in your purse or not.
The daft thing is that these things actually aren’t that useful to me. I don’t drink a lot of hot drinks, I don’t drive & I only rarely go to the supermarket as I now do virtually all my grocery shopping online for home delivery. But I can totally see how someone else might find this stuff useful.
I appreciate that a modicum of thought has gone into considering what Fronius’s customers might find useful. That rather than splashing their logo over any random object they have attempted to find items which will get frequent use & might, in some small way, make their customers’ lives a little easier. Fronius, I applaud you!