Unlike any other industry, the utility vertical is no longer trying to promote its best and most pure commodity products. Buy less, not more. Buy differently. Behave differently. Produce your own energy. There is no single best solution, but if no one does anything we will all pay more. Getting consumers to adopt something, anything, is now at a premium. Energy marketers need to compete at the household level, and leverage both consumer intelligence and interaction insights to land the right offers.
A confluence of environmental mandates and rising resource costs is creating a huge conundrum for energy marketers: how to entice residential energy customers to not take for granted basic energy services that have historically been tremendous bargains, available on demand, requiring no contract, and mostly delivered without penalties for bad behavior. The threats of rising cost and scarcity drive conservation incentives for some players, while creating pricing headroom for others to introduce disruptive offerings. Baseline rate structures are migrating slowly towards increasing block rates and peak pricing. Bottom line: the basic utility offer construct is being overrun with system-driven changes, exploding choices and a dangerous, expanding gap in consumer understanding and involvement.
Utilities, retailers, energy services and clean tech providers all face similar marketing challenges: new buyers, insufficient track records of consumer behavior and adoption, diverging consumer priorities, and few burning platforms to motivate household-level change. Acxiom offers a focused portfolio of front-end consumer intelligence capabilities to help the energy industry engage customers, influence behaviors, drive adoption and build sustained relationships.
Energy Consumer Reference Model, an analytically-derived natural household segmentation that supports the targeting of relevant energy buying capacities, attitudes and behaviors. Provides consumer insights and explanatory values critical to front-end market assessments and consumer research.
Utility Data Packages, anchored by Acxiom’s leading consumer data asset repository delivering household demographics, economics, real property attributes, interests, affinities and buying behaviors. Provides foundational intelligence to support the creation of leading marketing analytics.
Preference and Personalization Capabilities, powered by Acxiom’s world-class consumer recognition capabilities and real-time technologies. Empowers marketing and customer service channels with inbound identity and preference management services, and delivers personalized messaging and best offers to the point of customer contact.
Customer Acquisition and Relationship Platforms, underpinned by Acxiom’s extensive marketing database experience, these solutions deliver integrated, multichannel marketing analytics, campaign management services and knowledge capture that create a single view of the customer and accelerate marketing efficiency and effectiveness.