Tag Archives: energy

Articles, CHARGE2017

The journey from RWE to Innogy

Almost two years ago, the German energy giant RWE spun off a large part of its operations into the subsidiary Innogy. Innogy took over the operations of renewables and networks and the consumer-facing retail operations of RWE’s business. It marked a bold move to face the changing times ahead in energy.  Innogy was to become a DSO brand, a retail brand but more importantly a renewable energy brand. But as the name suggests, Innogy was not to become just another renewable or sustainable energy brand. The Innogy brand made a connection between sustainability and the usage of renewable to innovation.

At CHARGE 2017, Sabine Schmittwilken, the global head of brand at Innogy, spoke about how the transition from RWE to Innogy or rather how RWE wanted to start again with a clean slate and change part of its business into Innogy. As she put it so bluntly and honestly:

“We were completely ignorant of people’s needs, ignorant of global trends. At that time, RWE had invested billions in a new conventional energy park. And then all of the sudden, the German Energiewende came […] All of the sudden we needed a new future and new answers”.

Going through the process of re-discovering their purpose in a changed world – RWE found that renewables would soon become the new normal in the energy space. It was not enough to claim differentiation through clean energy when everyone could make the same claim within ten years. Clean energy market entry is not as unique as it used to be.

To discover what truly could set RWE apart in the marketplace, the company looked back at its roots to its founder Hugo Stinnes, a great innovator and entrepreneur who was considered to be crazy at the time to have the ambition to bring electric lighting to even the poorest. It was considered an impossible challenge to overcome in the early 1900s but was achieved. With the spirit of achieving what is considered impossible, the foundations of the company’s new strategy were put in place.

Sabine went further into what led to spinning what would become Innogy from RWE at CHARGE 2017 in Iceland. It is a good primer in Energy Company Branding and a gives an overview of the process in general. The full presentation can be found in the player below.

Discover more from thought leaders in the energy space at CHARGE 2018 in Reykjavik, Iceland. September 24-25. An Energy Conference in Europe but really close to America. Early Bird tickets are available until the end of June.

Articles, CHARGE2017

Does Geothermal Energy create better Footballers?

Located close to Reykjavík in the Reykjanes peninsula, HS-Orka is primarily focused on geothermal energy both in terms of creating electricity and heating. The vast amount of waste heat that is a byproduct of its generation has created a great opportunity for innovation in further utilising the geothermal resources. From a natural spa to fish farms and other high-tech start-ups, the motto of HS-Orka has been to not think inside the box “there is no box”.

At CHARGE last year, Ásgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the company talked about football and how geothermal energy has created better footballers for Iceland. In his presentation, he showed that there was a correlation between the number of geothermally heated indoor soccer halls in Iceland and the rise of the nation’s national football team up the FIFA rankings ladder.

HS-Orka has focused on progress and the company is passionate about doing better than before and being brave. “There are many ideas that fail but that is alright”. Ásgeir went on to say that there is nothing as waste, waste is simply something that they haven’t found a use for yet.  The key to finding new ways to turn waste into a useful resource, according to Ásgeir, is to have an interdisciplinary discussion between people of different backgrounds both from the power companies and innovators.

Articles

Energy brands and strategic vision

 

Retail energy strategy is about finding the right positioning and implementing it. Energy company branding is not simple for energy providers, positioning on the market requires a deep knowledge of how energy consumers behave and how the market can be disrupted. For incumbent utilities, this can be a difficult task since consumers have an already established idea of what the utility is and what it does and how it reacts. The utility company and the idea consumers have about it is changing, both with the entrance of smaller newcomers and changing technology.

The age of consumer choice in power markets

Power providers have been unbundled in most liberalised markets and the challenge for all participants in the market is to unlock customer value by creating brand value that gives the customer a reason to choose. Customers that have been indifferent towards their energy suppliers are slowly but surely responding to marketing programs and branding in the energy space. What has become the most common form of differentiation in market messages on the energy market has been a green positioning, focusing on the renewables that the energy provider can source for their customers.

Renewable Energy Strategies

Renewable energy strategies can vary, depending on the market and how customers on the market perceive renewables. In most countries, solar and wind are considered to be THE sources of renewable energy while sources such as nuclear and especially hydro are branded as sustainable or clean sources of electricity. While solar and wind are still sufficient to power regular homes, the technology is not just there in terms of scale and efficiency to give reliable power to large-scale industrial users. Many large companies are, however, demanding renewable energy to power their production or be the backbone of their services. It does not matter how green/renewable/sustainable/clean the source of the energy is. What matters is that the brand that is promoting the source of energy that it sells to its customers is also a sustainable brand. Being a sustainable brand is not about renewing the colour palette to reflect a greener colour.

Customer engagement strategy

The brands that are able to deliver results in connecting to the minds of consumers are the brands that are delivering a higher purpose. It is not just a matter of the cover – it is also about the contents inside. The truly effective energy brands are about changing the status quo. Effective brands set out to change the world. They identify gaps in the market by thinking like a consumer. Often they are founded by regular consumers that are fed up with the way things are done. From the start, these brands are equipped with a vision. Their strategic market entry is done by a narrow customer segmentation – by being focused on a niche market that they can expand further down the road.

Doing something new

The top companies for customer experience are not myopic about technology. Smart metering is an add-on to the experience but it can not the solution to everything. If a brand is not well crafted and lacks strategy and vision, the execution of the possibilities of smart metering will at best become awkward. Utility analytics and customer engagement metrics are a valuable add-on for the energy marketer and anyone interested in maintaining a brand. Smart metering enables customer engagement metrics and smart customer service but customer engagement and loyalty do not come automatically with smart meters and smart meter data. People engage with brands – not technology. Technology enables further customer engagement in energy and it can help customer segmentation. But technology and user interface must be appealing and easy for customers. To be able to make it easy for customers, companies need a good user interface and to be able to design a good user interface, energy companies need to be able to understand the end customer.

The Future of Energy

The future of energy is customer choice. Customers are already able to choose a supplier in deregulated markets but energy consumers around the world are already able to choose if they bypass the regulated monopolies altogether through microgrids, their own rooftop solar or other ways of localised small-scale production of energy. The future of energy is in the hands of the consumer and the energy companies that are able to build their value proposition according to the needs of the consumers will own the future.

 

 

 

Articles, CHARGE 2018

Sustainability Branding disrupting the Energy Space

Apple has become a licensed electricity retailer in the US. Photo credit: Apple Canada
Apple has become a licensed electricity retailer in the US. Photo credit: iPhone in Canada

CHARGE is not primarily a utilities & energy conference but is also meant for companies that are actively pursuing to create value for their customers with energy branding; that is creating a competitive advantage with branding and marketing energy that they use. Energy efficiency is a big part of energy branding since the most valuable and sustainable energy is the energy that is never used.

The growing number of companies participating in initiatives such as RE100 has shown that sustainable brands are a part of the mainstream, sustainable brands are not primarily a part of niche marketing preaching to the already converted. Sustainable brands have become brands that have already established themselves in the homes of the everyday consumer.

Sustainable brands are pushing for access to 100% renewable energy and are either switching their supplier to secure sustainable energy or producing energy on their own. Some of the sustainable brands that have just entered the energy space are producing energy to offset their own usage due to the fact that they can’t procure 100% renewable off the grid or are simply producing renewable energy on-site.

These invaders to the energy space have not all the sudden become interested in becoming energy companies but are acting on the demand of their customers. Consumers today are concerned about the energy used to produce the products or services they use but the utilities have not acted quick enough to meet the demand of the sustainable brands. Instead of waiting for the utilities, the sustainable brands have acted to meet the demand of the consumer today or demand that sustainable brands foresee tomorrow.

Good brands are not reacting to the situation as it is today. Good brands try to predict the future and are quicker to market than the competition. The key lesson utilities and the energy industry in whole should learn from the sustainable brands is that if you don’t shape the future of your market, someone else will and the future will be theirs.

Articles

The Decentralisation and democratisation of Energy

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There are many current challenges in the energy sector. The sector is adapting to increased demand for sustainable energy and balancing new renewable sources with the current loads of the users connected to the grid. The generation of energy by renewables such as wind and solar at industrial scale is not the only challenge the utilities need to find a sustainable way to implement but also how to feed the electricity created by distributed generation and prosumers onto the grid.

Communicating with prosumers

These challenges are not only for the engineers to figure out – they create an energy marketing challenge – how good are the energy brands in communicating with end customers of energy and how strong are the brands in creating a dialogue with different stakeholders in order to implement the renewables and different types of technology and adapt users to the new reality of the energy space.

A new two-way dialogue between energy company and consumer

Distributed generation and prosumers have created a whole new dialogue between utilities and the public – the public is no longer just the recipient of energy but is starting to feed electricity into the grid. It has been a headache for the regular consumer to understand the normal energy bills, imagine how the regular prosumer is able to understand the bill when he or she is the one charging the utility. This requires clear communication, good utility marketing and a good energy marketing communication needs the clear vision of the energy brand behind it.

De-centralising Energy

The democratisation of energy will happen on some scale in the coming years. The advancements in solar technology and small-scale generation of energy mean that price will come down. Powered by blockchain technology and smart devices, microgrids will begin to become more frequent where people trade energy they generate with their neighbours. Peer to peer trading of energy might become as common as running water is today. The energy customer of tomorrow might sell excess electricity that came from the rooftop and stored in their car onto the grid. Development and implementation of vehicle-to-grid solutions has already begun.

Adjusting to a new reality

Energy companies, whether it is the traditional utility or energy retailers might have to adjust to this new reality of microgrids and peer to peer energy trading. Although the need for their traditional services might not be as needed as it is today, they are trusted as experts in electricity and their brands might take advantage of that brand asset. Energy as a service will become an invaluable part of the business model and it will be interesting to follow the development of the unique value propositions that the future energy brands will offer their customers.

 

Articles

How will Shell-First Utility sell electricity in the UK?

A new beginning for Shell? Photo credit: Shell
A new beginning for Shell?
Photo credit: Shell

It’s almost the end of the year and we can say that the recent news of First Utility being acquired by Shell is the biggest energy branding news story of 2017. But it does not come as a total shock, at least not for people who attended CHARGE2016. First Utility has been operating in Germany for few years under a special license agreement with Shell, selling retail electricity to customers under the name of Shell PrivatEnergie.

Maik Neubauer, former CEO of First Utility in Germany, who was responsible for the Shell PrivatEnergie brand spoke at the World’s First Energy Branding Conference in Iceland in 2016.

In his presentation, Maik talked about how First Utility leveraged the Shell brand when entering the German energy retail market.

Maik sat down in the Engerati studio outside the conference hall to discuss the First Utility and Shell collaboration in further detail.

We are already lining up some interesting speakers for CHARGE 2018 in Iceland. If you want to stay ahead of the curve and get a global overview of what is happening in the branding of energy.

Articles, CHARGE 2018

Making sustainable energy relatable

CHARGE2017_day1 (110)
CHARGE Energy Branding 2017

At CHARGE, we try to bring to the table the best practices in Energy Branding and give a glimpse at what the best energy companies in the world are doing in terms of customer engagement and making their products and services more tangible by relating to the customer on human terms.

A part of the conference has focused on how companies are branding green outside the energy space. Companies that are focusing on sustainability are not only looking at becoming clean energy brands or branding green electricity by letting the customer know that they are using the best green energy in the world to make their products or services. They are looking at how they can cut costs by being sustainable. Being sustainable can often cut electricity used or energy consumed.

It is often the case that it is not the sustainability itself or being good for the planet that increases brand value in itself. As it has been discussed at the energy conference, consumers are often inadvertently interested in energy itself and how companies are sourcing their green energy. The clean energy coming from the rooftop of the store you are shopping at creates some value in the mind of the customer. Energy marketing conference is one way to put it, it is not only about energy retailers trying to catch the attention of the customer – branding or marketing energy is also a way for retailers or manufacturers to tell a unique story to the customers. And in a way, it is a green energy conference although it is just one of many topics discussed. It is a utilities and energy conference in the widest sense. Sustainability is an energy issue in one way or another. It reflects on how companies can become sustainable on the balance sheet by behaving thrifty when it comes to energy consumption. And by telling that story, brands can increase their value in the mind of the consumer.

Hosting the conference in Iceland means that it is the perfect place for a global energy event. The country is known for its production of clean, renewable energy – both hydro and geothermal. Being placed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Iceland is also the perfect place to bring together key decision makers together for an executive forum of people from all over the world. The energy space is often localised due to historical reasons and although the borders dividing the energy space are shrinking fast – there is a lot to learn from each other.

Join us in Reykjavik, Iceland where CHARGE will be hosted for the third time in September 2018. It will be one of the most memorable energy conferences of 2018. Iceland is exotic yet accessible with daily direct flights to three continents.

 

 

Articles

Know you segments

market_sementation

Segmenting the market and the customer base has in a way followed energy companies since the start. Market segmentation for utilities used to be less complicated – the customer was everyone living in a certain geographic area over a certain age. In short: everyone was the customer and everyone got the same message in a form of a bill or announcement of outages.

Enter the competitive retail energy markets

The competitive energy markets require more detailed segmentation. It is almost no longer possible to deliver the same message and the same service to just about everyone. And everyone is not looking for the same service from an energy retailer. Some people are following the lowest price, others are looking for a pleasant user experience, a group of consumers are after green energy and sustainable energy savings… the list goes on and most consumers are after a mixture of everything mentioned but put different emphasis on different factors.

How to segment energy consumers?

First off, there are, broadly speaking, four different types of segmentation.

Geographic segmentation segments users based on their location. This might seem like an outdated segmentation tool but rural energy customers have different needs than urban users. There are even different needs for users in different cities.

Demographic segmentation is along with geographic segmentation the most easily understood methods of segmentation and most used. Segmenting users by age, gender, income and family size sounds pretty familiar to everyone.

But electricity is not something bought off the shelves in supermarkets located in cities of a specific population density – electricity is not an easy made meal for a woman aged 35-42, married with two-point-two kids aged 7-12.

That is why energy requires more detailed segmentation.

Psychographic segmentation looks at lifestyles, personal characteristics – attitudes and how consumers live their lives. Branding is after all about creating something intangible on top of the core commodity – a certain spirit or experience. Psychographic segmentation looks at how people look at life and that is where it is likely for a brand to succeed.

Geographic and demographic segmentation still play a part and one type of segmentation does not exclude another.

Your brand can speak to different groups. But you should not change the brand for each group your brand is speaking to but your brand can approach each group differently but with a coherent voice.

Moving from the macro-segmentation of the market to the micro-segmentation of your customers.

While speaking to the market at large, the brand also needs to communicate with customers and customers can usually be segmented. This is where behavioural segmentation comes in (remember – one approach does not exclude the next) to offer different types of customers different types of incentives. Big data and data analysis of your customers should be used to analyze their behaviour and see which groups of customers behave in a similar way.

Stakeholders

The energy sector is not only commanded by customers but also different stakeholders. For brands operating a regulated monopoly business and large energy companies with a global brand footprint – it is important to realise and map stakeholders in general. Stakeholder mapping helps utilities to visualise different stakeholders such as politicians, regulators, trade unions, environmentalists, large energy consumers and household consumers.

Tailoring the message for different segments

Building an effective energy brand and energy marketing is not only about customer engagement but also knowing who your brand is communicating to and how it should communicate at different points. Different segments are communicated to with a different type of message through different channels. One of the brand’s customer segments is price conscious while another is concerned about the environment. To make energy savings a point of brand value, the brand would approach the groups with a different message, the price savers would respond better to a message regarding how much money they would save from being energy efficient while environmentally concerned customers are more likely to respond to message regarding how they can contribute to saving the environment with energy efficiency.

CHARGE2017

CHARGE Awards Finalists

Charge_awards_Charge_nominees_all

The finalists for the World’s Best Energy Brands have been announced! After shortlisting and screening, 3-5 finalists remain in the 6 categories.

The finalists (in alphabetic order) in each category (in alphabetic order) are:

 

Challenger brands

  • Ovo energy
  • Public Power
  • Powershop
  • Octopus

Distribution brands

  • Elenia
  • Endesa
  • ESB networks

Established brands

  • Chugoku Electric Power
  • e.on
  • Edp
  • Enel
  • Fjordkraft

Green brands

  • Green Mountain Power
  • Greenpeace Energy
  • Natur Energie Plus
  • Nordic Green Energy
  • ON – Our Nature

Product brands

  • Green Energy Options (GEO)
  • Nissan
  • Tiko

Transmission brands

  • EirGrid
  • Fingrid
  • TenneT
CHARGE2016

Brand building through experience and relationship

At CHARGE 2016, Tomaz Oresic, Chairman of the board at Elektro Maribor, presented on the current outlook of the electricity supply value chain is going through major changes, with new players entering the market, shift of perception of electricity as a basic commodity and how the customer is increasingly being put at the very centre. These disruptive trends are changing the old electric utility business model with the result of an increasing number of utilities starting to pay more attention to branding.

Tomaz points out that utilities have been marketing an almost invisible product to an undefined customer with top-down communication strategies. These engagement strategies have often failed since the electricity suppliers have not walked the talk and due to mismatched communication.