With regulatory change, new technology, shifting customer expectations and cost volatility, energy and utilities sits in a complex, fast-moving landscape.
It's challenging for providers to differentiate and prove ROI in a commoditized, technical market, especially when regulatory pressures and complex buying committees make each sale harder to close. Market research tailored specifically to your audience gives you the actionable prospect and customer insights you need to differentiate and grow.
We’ve helped business after business better understand buyers’ needs, then improve their selling process and marketing plan.
How? Not with 150-page data-dump industrial marketing reports offering little actionable insight. Not with transactional, rigid, stale approaches. Not with traditional business-to-business industrial market research that ends up just boring-to-boring.
We’re a consultancy delivering real answers straight from your target market, then helping your business use them. We work with you, as an extension of your team. And we’re super flexible, delivering bespoke work tailored to your business objectives, no two market research projects are the same
Our utilities sector market research and consultancy expertise includes:
Electric utilities & natural gas providers.
Rate design, reliability planning, and how prospects weigh new supply and service providers.
Water & wastewater utilities.
Benchmarking customer experience and infrastructure investment priorities as ageing networks compete for capital.
Renewable energy companies (inc. hydro, solar, wind).
Positioning and adoption research as prospects move from early-incentive markets to mainstream procurement.
Grid & network operators.
Research to support modernization planning and how utilities navigate evolving reliability and regulatory demands.
Electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure companies
Adoption barriers, charging network buildout decisions, and how fleet and site-host buyers choose a provider.
Environmental & sustainability agencies.
Stakeholder engagement and how shifting policy changes buyer priorities.
Commercial & industrial energy suppliers.
Customer acquisition, retention, and differentiation research among business energy accounts in competitive, deregulated markets.
We help energy and utilities companies:
We’re really good at helping companies grow. Our utilities & energy market research has three guiding principles:
Immerse. Fully.
We know that the utilities and energy industry is very complicated. To provide you with useful and accurate market research insights, we’ll need to live and breathe your world.
So at the start of every project, we speak to as many of your internal stakeholders and review as many documents as we can, to become experts in your way of doing things.
Analyze buyers’ decisions.
It’s much easier to sell when you can see behind the scenes. Energy buying dynamics work in many ways, so our consultants and market researchers reveal how your different clients make decisions.
Are they flexible, or following a rigid framework? And who are they – junior staff, or senior execs? Then we’ll show what that decision process looks like, step by step.
Read emotions.
It’s also easier to sell when you can read buyers’ minds. Energy solutions are critical to companies’ success, so buyers’ decisions really matter – but that doesn’t mean decisions are purely rational.
Many clients stay with the same vendor because their account manager relationship is so strong, for example. Our smart research tools and techniques find the emotions driving buying decisions in the energy sector.
We support your business objectives by delivering accurate, actionable answers to your questions. Utility companies rely on us to research evolving needs across regulatory, competitive and market dynamics early. Whether it’s user satisfaction, buyer insights or brand perception you need, our energy and utilities market research helps you differentiate and grow.
Utility and energy deals rarely have one decision-maker. Procurement, engineering, finance, and sometimes regulatory affairs teams all weigh in on purchase decisions. We map the full buying committee before we design a single question, then interview across roles to understand who the key stakeholders driving the decision are, and what they need to say yes.
Energy and utilities research often needs input from people who rarely take market research calls, like plant managers, network engineers, sustainability leads and procurement teams. We build recruitment specs around real job functions rather than generic titles, sourcing directly from professional networks and industry contacts, then design interviews that respect how technical these roles are. This process makes sure you get input from the people who actually influence the decision, not just whoever’s easiest to reach.
Yes. A regulated utility and a deregulated supplier compete on entirely different terms: one on service and compliance, the other on price and switching behavior. We always tailor our research design to the market you’re competing in, ensuring our insights reflect your real competitive picture, not a generic utilities framework.
Early-stage concept testing tells you whether a new product or technology actually solves a problem customers care about, before you commit budget to it. We test messaging, pricing, and adoption barriers with your real audience, so launch decisions are based on evidence, not internal assumptions.
Yes, market research helps with ESG and sustainability positioning, and not only for renewables companies. Every part of the sector faces sustainability-linked scrutiny, from regulators, investors, and increasingly buyers themselves. We help clients understand how sustainability credentials factor into purchase decisions, so positioning is based on your buyer’s real pain-points, not internal assumptions.