Enbala—a company that helps utilities and energy retailers manage the energy grid to improve operational reliability, revenue, and customer satisfaction—needed more power behind its branding.
The company had a superior solution. But after a period of intense growth, Enbala needed to update its market positioning to precisely articulate its current offerings and business benefits. To make sure its new branding connected with its target clients, Enbala worked with Refactored to develop customer personas and a customer-centered messaging framework.
The Deep Dive
We began by facilitating a workshop to gather insights from key company subject matter experts and stakeholders, including the CEO and product development, sales, and customer support teams. We delved into Enbala itself:
What was the unique value of its solutions?
What did it have that competitors did not?
What were its core values and priorities?
What type of relationship did it hope to develop with customers?
We also worked with the Enbala team to identify a set of customers who were willing to be interviewed about their experience with the company.
Getting to Know Customers
Next, we conducted individual interviews with Enbala customers to get a clear view of precisely what attracted them to the company:
What were their roles?
What aspect of the buying decision did they influence?
Which other stakeholders did they need approval from?
What needs drove them?
How did they learn about Enbala?
How did they prefer to consume information—and what sort of information had they been looking for when they learned of the company’s offerings?
What did they like—or dislike—about the company and its solutions?
What were their biggest concerns and most pressing goals?
What other options did they consider?
With this information, we were able to develop specific customer personas that embodied Enbala’s audience and highlighted their greatest needs.
Making a Connection
With the advance of sustainable energy systems, utilities face a major challenge: integrating conventional power stations and load control-based demand response with new systems that manage a combination of distributed assets and a demand-based response where the variability of output must be managed moment to moment.
Enbala’s forward-thinking team offered a vital solution for energy providers. Yet its branding made the company sound less like a provider of solutions for utilities and more like a direct B2C energy provider.
Making the connection between what we learned from Enbala customers and what we knew from our discussions with Enbala staff, we developed corporate-, product-, and persona-level messaging that clearly communicated the company’s purpose, scope, solutions, and purpose. The new messaging made a direct connection between Enbala’s unique core value and customers’ business needs.
We also worked with the company to redesign its logo, modernizing the mark to illustrate the balance
Enbala delivers to customers’ systems. We offered advice for how the new company, product, and persona messaging could take shape via an updated website, delivering specific information to key audiences and markets based on the customer and company interviews that we conducted.
Re-Energized Marketing
With its new messaging and a revitalized understanding of its audience, Enbala was able to complete its rebranding project.
The company changed its logo from one that illustrated a bolt of electricity and included the tagline “Power Networks” to one that implies an interconnected grid and includes the tagline “Your grid. In balance.” Its messaging moved from focusing primarily on revenue potential to highlighting reliability and capacity.
With these changes in place, the company is better positioned to attract and maintain customer engagement.