Peninsula Clean Energy
From awareness to action: research-backed brand messaging that resonates with clean energy customers.
Peninsula Clean Energy, a California community choice aggregator serving San Mateo County, had a strong mission—but an open question: were their brand messages actually landing with customers? Hawks Peak Strategies designed and executed a two-phase mixed-methods message testing study to find out, delivering data-driven recommendations that gave PCE the evidence it needed to sharpen its brand and deepen customer engagement.
The Challenge
Strong brand values mean nothing if customers can’t connect with the words used to express them.
Peninsula Clean Energy needed to understand how customers perceived its brand, which messages resonated—and which fell flat. Key questions included whether terms like “public agency” and “shareholder” were helping or hurting, whether affordability and clean energy messaging were connecting together or separately, and what emotional associations customers held for the PCE brand.
Our Approach
Hawks Peak designed a rigorous two-phase study—qualitative interviews & a multi-lingual quantitative survey—to test brand messages with real customers.
In Phase 1, Dr. Henderson conducted in-depth virtual interviews with PCE customers across San Mateo and Los Banos, probing brand awareness, emotional associations, and reactions to three candidate brand messages. Findings directly informed Phase 2: a 300+ respondent survey designed to quantitatively measure message clarity, relevance, importance, favorability, and likelihood to drive customer action amongst English-, Spanish-, and Mandarin-speaking customers. Together, the two phases trianulated findings across methodologies to produce high-confidence messaging recommendations.
The Outcome
The research gave PCE clear, evidence-based direction on which brand messages to prioritize—and which language to avoid—grounded in what customers actually think and feel.
- Found that combined “affordable, clean electricity” messaging outperformed either value alone.
- Identified terms that created confusion and dissonance for customers in a non-profit context, with specific plain-language alternatives surfaced from customer voices
- Delivered a five-part recommendation framework guiding PCE’s brand messaging strategy, message rotation priorities, awareness-building campaigns, and service-specific marketing approach
When brand strategy is built on what customers actually say—not what organizations assume they hear—the message lands. And when the message lands, customers engage.
Why This Work Is Different
Brand strategy shaped by rigorous, multilingual customer research—replacing assumptions with evidence to drive clarity, trust, and meaningful engagement.
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