Insights Powered by Cogent Reports™
In competitive markets, brand strength has long been associated with positive business outcomes, including growing revenue through increased market share, elevated pricing power and higher customer loyalty. While market share and customer loyalty haven’t historically been things utilities think about, they are taking on a new strategic importance as the tectonic plates underpinning the 21st century energy market continue to shift.
Utilities are beginning to manage their brands to support the new market challenges they face—from implementing new rate structures to figuring out how to sustain financial growth. Successfully navigating these challenges requires strong brands with enough emotional leverage to persuade consumers to come along on the journey to a new energy future.
Our Utility Trusted Brand & Customer Engagement study, now in its sixth year, focuses on the impact of brand on customer engagement for the utility industry, making Market Strategies-Morpace the undisputed leader in brand insights for utilities. Through this research, we’ve identified three elements of brand value for utilities:
- Enhanced pricing power via customer support for higher rates.
- Revenue growth by capturing market share for new product offerings not protected by the utility’s monopoly position.
- Lower risk of customer and load defection as customers consider distributed energy resources and dis-intermediators.
Projective exercises—the presentation of calibrated stimuli onto which a respondent projects their feelings, attitudes or beliefs—are a critical asset in the qualitative researcher’s emotional toolbox. The technique offers the promise of achieving greater depth and validity of insight by facilitating expression of subconscious or difficult-to-articulate feelings that are less accessible using direct “Q&A.”
Every impression counts when promoting and maintaining a successful business, and managing your brand identity is a major factor in that success. Whether it’s your logo, your website or your business cards, your customers build an impression of your company through every interaction they have with it. Each touchpoint adds up to create your brand image. But in today’s dynamic digital market, customers have more ways than ever to engage with brands.
With digital transformation occurring at breakneck pace, it is time to shift gears. Our wish list revolves around reinvigorating your brand and your approach to 
As utilities face increasing deregulation and competition from distributed generation, they need to refocus their key performance indicators (KPIs) on metrics that describe customer actions and sentiment rather than on the somewhat passive metric of operational satisfaction.
There’s no doubt that online sales are growing. In fact, 