Brand belongs upstream

A new generation of energy leaders are challenging a common assumption: brand starts after the important decisions are made.

That model fails when customers do not understand, trust or adopt what an energy company offers.

This year’s CHARGE Energy Branding Rising Stars are bringing brand closer to the decisions that create value. They are using customer insight to sharpen commercial focus, connecting marketing more tightly to sales, product, and engineering, and challenging the idea that brand begins once there is something to communicate.

For Sultana Rahman, Head of Product Marketing for Hosts at YourParkingSpace, the principle is straightforward.

“Brand is everything, right?”

For Sultana, brand helps a newer business earn trust, explain its wider offer and compete on more than price.

Relevance creates commercial advantage

In a complex market, focus has commercial value. Trying to reach more people can feel like growth, but relevance comes from knowing which customers matter, what they need, and where the business can make the greatest difference.

Emily Clayton, Senior Marketing Executive at SmartestEnergy, is clear about the risk of trying to be everything to everyone.

“You can’t do something for absolutely everyone because that just dilutes your message.”

For Clayton, getting closer to the customer means getting closer to the people already listening to them. Sales teams and traders hear the questions, pressures, and pain points first. Marketing can then use that insight to make better decisions about where to focus, what to prioritize, and how to provide value for customers.

“What are the big problems that they’re always talking about? What are their concerns and their pain points?”

Zenobia Sayed, energy strategy consultant and founder of At The Power Table podcast, sees the same challenge from the customer’s perspective. The energy industry may understand why change needs to happen, but that doesn’t mean customers understand why it matters to them.

“Customers are thinking ‘I have to pay bills. I don’t really care about your mandate.’”

Her challenge to the industry is simple: start with the reality of the people you need to bring with you.

“No one has said, ‘This is how it impacts you. This is what is in it for you.’”

That is where customer insight becomes more than a communications tool. It helps businesses decide which opportunities matter, which audiences to prioritize, and how to make the proposition relevant to them.

The commercial advantage isn’t just about reaching everyone but about mattering more to the people who matter.

Adoption turns innovation into value

Knowing what customers need is only valuable if that understanding shapes what the business builds.

Sultana brings that thinking to YourParkingSpace as it evolves beyond its marketplace heritage into a broader parking solutions business, including EV charging. The opportunity is significant, but technology alone won’t create the value.

“Mobility has to be easy. The harder you make it, the less likely people are going to adopt.”

That puts customer experience at the heart of the commercial proposition. A sophisticated product that people struggle to use creates little commercial value. Innovation creates potential. Adoption turns that potential into growth.

It also challenges the traditional handoff between marketing, sales, product, and engineering.

“There’s this common perception that as soon as the lead has been taken by sales, that’s a sales job now. Which is incorrect.”

For Sultana, the customer needs to stay present throughout the commercial journey. What sales hears should inform marketing. What customers ask for should shape product. What product learns should reach engineering.

“That’s my role as a product marketeer – hearing what’s needed on the ground and feeding it back.”

When that loop works, marketing does more than take a capability to market. It helps the business create something the market wants in the first place.

Your org chart isn’t your brand

Creating something customers want is one challenge. Getting the whole business to deliver it is another.

Karla Mlakar has helped bring international companies and teams together under the Kelag International brand. A single identity creates clarity and strengthens the organization’s connection to the credibility, scale and expertise of its parent company, the Austrian Kelag Group, with more than 100 years of experience in the energy sector.

But a shared identity does not automatically create a shared business.

“Shifting everybody under one umbrella internally – it’s a really big change for the people.”

For Karla, the work does not stop with a common identity. Culture, internal communication and processes need to reinforce what the brand promises to customers and partners.

In a complex B2B business, the brand is carried by far more people than the marketing or sales team.

“We don’t have a traditional sales department, but many of our people are involved in building commercial relationships.”

Every external interaction shapes how partners experience the company.

“Every employee who communicates externally is our brand ambassador.”

Technical expertise gets a company considered. How it behaves can determine whether it is chosen. Customers do not see an organization chart. They see how people work together. A rebrand can create one identity. Its real value emerges when people across the organization bring that identity to life.

Proof beats polish

If brand is going to play a bigger role in creating commercial value, it must show the value it creates.

Rahman is explicit about what it takes to shift perceptions of YourParkingSpace beyond its marketplace heritage.

“We need to show them that we can do this.”

Case studies, credible customers, and demonstrated outcomes give people a reason to believe the broader proposition. They also help the business compete on more than price.

Clayton also says clear OKRs and KPIs should connect marketing to wider business goals and prove its value.

Evidence must also be easy to understand.

Rebecca Emelie Arntsen, Communications Manager at Vårgrønn, sees clarity itself as a test of credibility when communicating complex offshore wind projects.

“If I don’t understand it, how can anyone else who isn’t an engineer understand it?”

Making expertise understandable is one challenge. Getting it beyond the corporate echo chamber is another.

“Because of the algorithm, we are usually speaking to the ones that agree with us anyway.”

Arntsen found that using more personal employee voices helped ideas travel further than relying solely on the corporate profile.

“We gained so much more by using a slightly different tone of voice, because we made it personal. We had to be the ambassadors.”

Sayed reaches a similar conclusion from the community perspective.

“It needs to filter down into communities, and people trust their people.”

And no single organization can manufacture that trust alone.

“There isn’t a single company who can build all of that trust and do it all by themselves.”

Technical evidence matters, but Sayed and Arntsen show that who delivers it can determine how far it travels and whether people trust it.

Bring brand into earlier decisions

The old model put brand at the end of the process.

These Rising Stars are moving it closer to the beginning, into the decisions about which customers matter, what they need, what gets built, how the business delivers it, and what it can credibly promise.

That is a bigger job for brand.

Brand does not simply explain growth after it happens. From the start, it helps create the conditions for it.