Case Study - Enersee
“In short: they had a kick-ass product. They had a logo. But they didn’t have a brand story.”
Problem
Imagine: you’re a SaaS start-up. You have a kick-ass product that ticks all the right boxes. It’s sustainable, it’s AI-powered and it helps your (big) clients save (lots of) money. You also invested in a state of the art website that has plenty of Call To Actions.
But when somebody asks you what your company does, you struggle. You have so much to tell. Yet you get so little time. Not getting your story across is frustrating at receptions. It’s downright dramatic on your website. It translates to fuzzy communications. And that results in low conversion rates.
Insight
Like so many startups in the tech industry, Enersee was founded by really smart people. Think bio-engineers who graduated Magna Cum Laude. The kind of people that think long and hard about a problem. And then come up with a great idea and fix it.
The problem Maarten and Joachim thought about was efficient energy management in buildings for large companies. It’s a big problem. Globally, buildings account for about 30% of final energy consumption and 26% of energy-related CO₂ emissions.
The solution they came up with? A SaaS platform that uses AI and focused dashboards to tell you where you are wasting energy. The strength of the tool: it translates a myriad of data into actionable insights.
When they talked about their platform, they talked about the features. Because that’s what engineers do. How it was different from a conventional energy management system (EMS). They used words like ‘conserved quantitative property’ and wrote sentences like ‘consumption data without any profound interpretation (data without deep expert-level interpretation = useless)’.
In short: they had a logo. They had a visual identity.
But they didn’t have a consistent brand story. And they lacked a tone of voice.
That’s where Brandtag stepped in.
Solution
To help everybody on the team align on a brand story, I write a brand manifesto. It’s a one-slide-statement that tries to catch the essence of your company. I usually end the manifesto with a baseline. A slogan that tells the big story in one sentence.
In my experience, good lines have two layers. They hold a universal truth in it, one that you can’t really argue with. Or they provoke the reader with a surprising thought. That is the first layer.
But the line should also immediately translate to the product. That is the second layer.
A good line is also deceivingly simple.
For Enersee, the line became:
‘Why Waste Energy?’
The client liked the line so much they put it on their homepage.
Furthermore, we provided them with a verbal brand strategy. No long guidelines. Just six rules of thumb they can hand out to every copywriter they hire.
Result
Enersee now has a brand story worthy of the product. And the market seems to like it. Delhaize just asked Enersee to roll out their platform for 700 supermarkets and affiliates. Seems like the branding exercise wasn’t a waste of energy.