Making energy price claims can be a minefield, but Frank Energy came up with a clever solution, scooping two wins at the YouTube NZ Marketing Awards 2024.
Frank Energy, formerly Energy Online, won Excellence in New Brand Development and Excellence in Utilities/Communications Marketing Strategy for ‘The Year NZ Got Franked’.
Debuting in early 2022 with the goal of becoming New Zealand’s largest tier two energy brand within three years, Frank Energy achieved strong growth in its first 12 months with a focus on value, simplicity and gimmick-free transparency.
However, the brand still had a lot of work to do to reach its ambitious growth targets, so it undertook a business review and discovered competitive pricing was the primary factor influencing path to purchase.
“While pondering all this, fervour around NZ’s cost of living crisis peaked with media showcasing everyday Kiwis struggling to make ends meet daily,” Frank Energy explained in its entry.
“An important insight emerged. Financial pain wasn’t just present for blue-collar families – it had spread to
all levels of society.
“People with baches at Pauanui were also feeling the pinch and watching their costs like never before.”
Unfortunately, energy pricing in New Zealand is complicated.
As Frank Energy noted in its entry: “With 27 independent lines companies and myriad other uncontrollable external costs from third parties going into your power bill, pricing is a minefield.
“The result is a retail energy industry reluctant to talk about relative price – unlike supermarkets, telcos and many other traditional retailers that can make watertight comparisons, in power it’s just too hard to make any definitive claims around the competitive nature of your prices.”
Developing a strategy to own competitive pricing and communicate it to the market “without ending up in court” was daunting.
Frank Energy came up with “The Year NZ Got Franked”. It spawned the “Same Energy, Probably Cheaper” TV campaign that received two silver and two bronze medals at the 2024 Axis Awards for creative excellence.
The first step was developing a national pricing strategy that positioned Frank Energy among the cheapest three retailers across the country.
“Painstaking analysis of thousands of competitor plans and market dynamics over many months finally delivered the answer.
“We could confidently claim that, for the majority of New Zealanders, a shift to a Frank Energy plan would see them paying less for their power.
“We couldn’t say we were the cheapest in the land, but we could say we were ‘probably cheaper’ – and now possibly the owner of NZ’s most creatively provocative price-led energy marketing campaign.”
The strategy required input and support from across the business, not just the two-person marketing team but the legal team, the internal PR and comms teams and frontline customer service staff.
The first point of engagement was with the executive team, to ensure the strategy had their endorsement and
still aligned to the wider multi-brand strategy Frank Energy is one half of (it is owned by Genesis Energy and
the two brands compete with each other).
The strategy helped Frank Energy achieve ambitious targets in terms of connection growth, churn, brand metrics and market share.
Between May 2023 and March 2024, the brand more than doubled its net connection growth during its brand launch period – a result delivered with 15% less media investment compared to the benchmark.
Frank Energy also aimed to reduce churn in FY23/24, and by December 2023 it achieved the lowest ever churn result for the brand of 16.5% – the best in a competitive market where many brands have churn over 40%.
It also improved prompted brand awareness from 31% to 48% and consideration from 17% to 27% between early 2023 and April 2024.
At the time of its Awards Entry, Frank Energy was expecting to become NZ’s largest tier 2 energy brand by June this year, eight months ahead of target.
It expected backlash from competitors. “Yet, except for one strongly worded letter from one of the big guys that asked us to stop our campaign immediately to avoid legal action, our work has been met with total silence – other than the sound of people’s footsteps, crossing the road to join us.”
Judges’ comments
Excellence in New Brand Development
“A winning entry! And a win for Frank! Really compelling, clear objectives that were then overdelivered on. The results were comprehensive.
“It was obvious who the competition was, the strategy was well connected and it is evident that learnings were actually taken on board and execution was exceptional.
“The platform has been set for growth. We are excited to see Frank continue to win.”
Excellence in Utilities/Communications Marketing Strategy
“Overall, this initiative has delivered a set of outstanding results from a new challenger brand. Judges were unanimous in this being a clear standout.
“True to their brand, Frank honestly articulated the problem they were navigating and threw out a brave challenge on price and value, which has resonated with customers at a time of household budgetary challenges. Importantly, judges noted that this was an extremely well-crafted submission.”
This was first published in the 2024 September-October NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
