Ten Years of SE² #1: Telling the Story of Retrofit

SE² is ten years old this year and, as part of our celebrations, we will be publishing a series of blogs drawing on some of our experiences over the past decade. In part, this is to help all our friends and followers to find out more about what we do; it’s also a chance for us to indulge our fondness for nostalgia!

So, the first in our series of blogs is all about our experience marketing retrofit.

Our first official retrofit marketing job was the Flagship Home, a whole house retrofit project in West London which aimed to reduce carbon emissions by 60%. That was a project built of barriers: an HMO owned by a private landlord, in a conservation area, with all work taking place in a one-month period whilst construction was under way. We hosted Open Days for 150 visitors while measures were being installed, secured coverage on Newsnight and the World Service, and held a launch event with then Environment Minister Lord Whitty. We also promoted the monitoring work that was carried out and the results of the retrofit – and yes, that 60% carbon reduction target was met and exceeded!

Our marketing and communications work has carried on through the years – from piloting marketing activities targeting private landlords and their tenants, to campaigns to support local authorities and housing associations improve the energy performance of their homes, to community engagement and outreach on fuel poverty, to promoting awards and competitions for CHP and district heating installations, low carbon vehicles, community sustainability schemes and more!

We have always had a role in helping technical specialists to “translate” what they do to a wider audience. We provided engagement support to EPSRC and AHRC funded research programmes with university consortia exploring different aspects of energy performance in buildings and framing of climate change. We have helped architects, builders, renewable energy companies and engineers to develop their own marketing capacity and, most recently, our communications expertise has helped the Technology Strategy Board to explore and explain the findings of the Retrofit for the Future programme.  Liz is now a Fellow at CoRE running training for industry and community organisations in how to promote retrofit to householders and commercial or public sector partners.

So what has our experience taught us?

• Understanding the customer is essential. Robust market segmentation makes life a lot easier; you can build offers and campaigns which will really resonate with your target market. The more segmentation you can build in, the better, even if your segments become quite specific and small.
• Much of the energy efficiency industry does not think about marketing. In particular, I’d point at the heating installer base, small builders and insulation companies and suggest that they have been reliant on traditional methods (word of mouth, Yellow Pages) or the obligations of partners (eg, the energy companies) to promote their products. Businesses in the sector will only be financially sustainable if they can create ongoing demand for their products without being at the mercy of the stop-start subsidy market.
• Energy is a slow burner (pardon the pun). Purchases of energy using equipment and energy saving measures don’t happen overnight; they are often couched in terms of wider projects (eg, replacing appliances when getting a new kitchen, improving insulation when doing wider building works). This means that customer relationships need to be built over time, but it’s also very challenging for such a fragmented sector to work in this way. The energy adviser, retrofit coordinator, assessor or whichever intermediary is acting on behalf of the customer has a vital role to play here.

For all of our successes, there are a few challenges that we still have to address in our second decade:

• Those pesky private landlords: what combination of incentive, regulation, penalty and attitude shift is really going to drive significant change in the private rented sector?
• Building a mass market for solid wall insulation: we believe it’s possible, with some investment from industry, a geographically targeted approach (Liz would start with market towns and capitalise on the spirit that movements like Transition have brought about), and a real effort to raise public awareness. It’s hard to create a mass market when no-one knows about your product – you have to start somewhere and be realistic about the rate at which change will happen…
• Applying the lessons of behavioural science to energy choices and use: too many communications campaigns have relied on marketing tactics. Advances in behavioural science – and greater accessibility of the theory behind it – mean that we have the opportunity to be much more sophisticated in our communication of energy and sustainability messages.

We’re developing some projects at the moment in these markets and would be happy to talk to potential partners. We’d also like to hear your views: how has the job of marketing energy efficiency and retrofit changed for you, and what do you think will be the big challenges in the next ten years? Email liz.warren@se-2.co.uk with your views or get in touch with @se2limited on Twitter.