Who’s Creating the Demand?

The lighting channel’s most expensive marketing investment reaches everyone — except the buyer.

By Bruno H. Silva, CLCP

I spent seven years inside a manufacturer’s sales organization traveling 47 weeks a year, training specifiers, authoring CEUs, and building a controls specification pipeline from scratch. We trained over 300 designers on our systems. That investment generated specification activity. It also taught me something the channel still has not reckoned with: almost nobody else was doing it, and the moment leadership changed, the investment stopped.

The lighting channel has a demand generation problem, and it sits on both sides of the aisle. Manufacturers are reactive. Agencies are reactive. And the industry’s single largest proactive marketing expenditure – the trade show – too often reaches the wrong audience.

Walk a trade show floor. At many industry events, the people in the aisles are primarily reps, distributors, and competitors; not the specifiers who will write the next project. Shows like LEDucation have changed that equation, drawing designers, architects, and engineers into a format built around education and direct engagement. But even when the right audience is in the room, the channel’s post-show infrastructure has not kept pace. The manufacturer spends six figures on a booth, collects badge scans and business cards, and hands those leads to a rep network already managing 100-plus lines of existing business. Three weeks later, those leads are cold. The investment is visible. The ROI evaporation afterward is invisible.

This is not a criticism of trade shows as relationship platforms, as they serve that function. But the industry treats them as demand generation engines, and they are not. They are channel communication events. The signal stays inside the channel. It does not reach the buyer.

The manufacturer’s expectation is that the agency will carry the demand generation function forward: visit specifiers, present new products, drive specifications. The agency’s reality is that with 80 to 150 lines on the card, proactive specification development gets crowded out by reactive project support; quoting, sampling, submittals, substitution requests. The demand generation function gets delegated down the chain until it reaches the specifier’s desk, where it arrives as a catalog and a lunch-and-learn invitation.

That is not demand creation. That is product awareness at best. The specifier, for that matter, is not an active demand generator either. They respond to projects that already exist; they do not call on building owners to recommend a lighting change. The specifier is a destination for existing demand, not the engine creating it.

Meanwhile, the contractor channel is moving in a different direction entirely. Design-build contractors are bypassing the specification path altogether. They do not need a product presentation; they need a turnkey solution they can price, install, and commission. The agency whose value proposition is specification influence has no entry point in that transaction. The demand was never generated through the traditional channel; the contractor created it independently and sourced it through whoever could deliver.

The result is a channel that waits for demand to appear rather than creating it. The manufacturer exhibits and waits. The agency quotes and waits. The distributor stocks and waits. The specifier researches independently, increasingly with AI tools, and contacts the channel only when a decision is already forming. By the time the rep gets the call, the competitive field is already set.

The channel does not lack effort or talent. What it lacks is a demand conversion infrastructure. It has an order-processing infrastructure, one that is highly effective at moving product once a project is in motion. But the function that creates the project, that generates the specification opportunity before anyone else sees it, is structurally absent.

It exists in pockets: individual manufacturers who invest in education, individual agencies who dedicate resources to proactive specification work. However, it is not a channel capability. It is an exception.

Until the industry treats demand generation as a discipline rather than a byproduct of trade show attendance, the channel will continue to optimize for processing orders that someone else created.

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About the author

Bruno H. Silva, CLCP, is an Electrical & Lighting Systems Integrator with four decades of experience spanning systems design, fabrication, controls integration, OEM manufacturing, and national sales leadership. He is the Principal of TechBruno Consulting, based in Saint Augustine, Florida.