The Problem
A public utility offered established renewable energy programs. Despite the longevity of these offerings, customer enrollment remained below potential.
They planned to invest in new marketing efforts to increase enrollment, but needed clarity on where the adoption challenge truly lay: lack of awareness, limited understanding of program value, uncertainty about how to participate, or a combination of these factors.
The utility sought a clear, evidence-driven foundation to pinpoint the primary barriers to adoption and guide a more focused, effective marketing approach.
The Approach
We designed a two-phase research approach that moved from exploration to validation:
– Fielded focus groups with customers across age groups to explore awareness, perceived value, and understanding of how to participate, and used these insights to form hypotheses for further testing.
– Designed a quantitative survey to rigorously assess awareness gaps, test value propositions, and evaluate the effectiveness of go-to-market channels.
– Fielded the survey among their customer base, ensuring representation from both existing clean energy program participants and non-participants to uncover meaningful differences and drivers of enrollment.
The Results
» Clear diagnosis that low enrollment was driven by limited awareness and skepticism that customers could actively choose clean energy, underscoring the need for awareness marketing.
» Identification of two core value propositions that resonated across customer groups, providing a consistent messaging framework for future campaigns.
» Confirmation that program cost was a primary barrier to enrollment, giving our client a clear issue to address to improve adoption.
» Evidence of meaningful differences in channel effectiveness between younger and older customers, informing more tailored go-to-market strategies by age group.
Did you know
Combining qualitative exploration with quantitative validation helps teams avoid scaling the wrong idea. Qual uncovers the “why,” while quant confirms which insights are real, widespread, and worth acting on.
