Over the last 2 years, our friends at LarsEn Energy Branding have been building the CHARGE energy branding conference. Since the electricity markets have moved from regulation to competition, consumers now have added influence. Below are some tips and tricks for increasing your energy brand awareness. If you’re interested in attending the CHARGE conference in Reykjavik, Iceland from September 24-25, please click the banner below.
Efficient energy brand communication
One of the most challenging tasks of utility companies is how to reach the ears and eyes of stakeholders and potential customers in a way that it gets noticed and remembered. Though energy efficiency has been a hot topic for energy companies, the most important task ahead is efficiency in communication – if communication goes by unnoticed, resources have been wasted.
Brand or be branded
Communication needs to come from a credible source – a source that the audience wants to listen to and notice in the first place – but also a source that is considered believable. The source of communication in utility marketing is always the brand. It does not matter if the utility does not consider it self to be in branding. If the utility does is not actively invested in its brand building then the brand, its image and credibility is out of the hands of the utility and the image of the utility is shaped by everyone else.
Utility marketing should start with building a brand. Communication efforts will not be taken seriously if the energy company has not effectively built a brand and has taken branding seriously. Communication processes such as the tone of voice and proactiveness can be created but to know how the processes are created, a good strategic tool is to know the brand and how the brand would behave as a person.
The cornerstone of every interaction
The big question facing many brand builders in the energy space is how to brand energy since electricity is a commodity that cannot be differentiated. The answer to the question is easy: differentiate your company with a unique brand that can be heard in the noisy clutter of communication people are bombarded with every day. The hard part is to follow up on the brand building and have the energy company behave as the brand at every level at the operation and at every touchpoint. If the brand behaves in accordance with what people expect and is consistently behaving as a brand at every touchpoint, the brand becomes credible.
Don’t settle with a credible brand – aim for incredible
With a strong brand that is incredible at getting the attention of their customers in a positive way, challenges become easier. An incredible brand has consistency and is dependable. Good energy brands know how to communicate with new challenges such as distributed energy and prosumers, they know how to fit new green energy technology to their service offering, know when and how to showcase their green electricity offering and how to add value for their customers with effective ingredient branding of either their power source.
Join the discussion at CHARGE 2018. CHARGE Energy Branding is the only utilities and energy conference that has a clear focus on energy branding and how utilities at every stage in the energy stream can benefit from a strong brand that delivers consistent and efficient communication to stakeholders.
The origins of CHARGE Energy Branding
The CHARGE concept was conceived during Dr. Fridrik Larsen’s PhD research. While interviewing marketing professionals within energy companies in Europe Fridrik found out two important things. For one, he found that there was a lot of knowledge on the importance of connecting to customers and stakeholders through a strong brand. Secondly, he found out that this knowledge was often silioed away in the marketing and communication departments of energy companies. It turned out that the biggest threshold for successful branding efforts in the energy space was the lack of support from upper management. This lack of support was traced a lack of understanding.
CHARGE is the first event of its kind, bringing together C-level executives from energy companies, marketing professionals and other experts in one room to discuss the importance of branding, allowing them to share knowledge and experiences and create a platform to introduce new ideas into the energy space.
Join us at CHARGE Energy Branding, a unique energy conference in Iceland September 24-25 2018.
About Energy Acuity
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EA’s unique approach merges primary research, public resource aggregation, web monitoring and expert analysis that is delivered through a simple, dynamic online platform. This allows our clients to focus on actionable information and win business over the competition.
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