AGL. Sustainable and affordable energy is in everyone’s interest.
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The Australian energy industry had come under increase scrutiny for the continued use of fossil fuels and their impact on the environment and increasing prices. As one of Australia’s biggest energy providers AGL’s consumer sentiment has consistently dropped and in 2016 it sat only above tobacco in the Reptrak Pulse Report.
Our brief was to reposition the AGL brand with Australian consumers, shift public perception and opinion, whilst improving AGL’s reputational score (Reptrack). We needed to do this by positioning AGL as a forward-thinking company that is focused on keeping the lights on today while thinking about the power needs of Australia in the future.
The Strategy.
Our objectives were to increase AGL’s reputational score (Reptrak) from 60.8 to 65+ and outrank our immediate competitors, Origin Energy and Energy Australia, maintain the lead by at least 2% for the metric ‘services that are relevant to me’, raise brand preference from 28% to 31% and raise trust from 31% to 34%.
Our qualitative research showed that to achieve these objectives, we had two distinct problems to solve; consumers want the cheapest possible energy bill and they want us to take a lead on the environment.
A large contributing factor for Australia’s continuing reliance on coal generated energy is the lack of a consistent national energy policy. Australian’s however wanted a clean solution, whether it came from the government or not.
Despite this lack of policy and leadership, AGL had a plan in place to move away from coal generation by 2048, and were already Australia’s largest non-governmental investor in renewable energy generation. We needed to reframe the narrative, and let Australia know that as Australia’s leading energy company, AGL were in a position to lead Australia towards a sustainable energy future.
The Execution.
An integrated campaign was developed to communicate AGL’s policy on energy. To cut through a narrative filled with heavily caveated and vague statements, we developed a campaign that was grounded in a level of honesty and realism
The campaign launched across all major channels, but the focus was across digital and social, where we could spark conversation amongst Australians to generate awareness and debate.
Our campaign started with a statement that no energy company has ever previously made in their marketing communications – that we were committed to getting out of coal generation.
We then followed this up by educating Australians about what AGL is doing to move Australia away from its reliance on coal, while at the same time not compromising on the level of service and price that consumers expect.
The Results.
The results for the campaign were amazing and completely smashed all campaign objectives.
After the first month of the campaign AGL NPS score moved an unheard of 15% from -26.2% to -11.11%. With the campaign objective to improve NPS by 3%, this represents a result exceeding targets by 500%.
In the first 2 months of the campaign TV cut through of 46% was achieved against an industry standard of 9%, furthermore branding had achieved 70% against an industry standard of 41%.
Over the first 25 weeks of the campaign AGL acquired over 96,000 more residential customers then they had in the previous 25 weeks.
Most importantly AGL demonstrated leadership on one of the most important issues faces the country today. We started a national conversation that took a life of it’s own amongst the media, politicians and the people.
