The power of personalizing brand experiences

David Quin, Director of Brand and Communications Strategies at CenterPoint Energy, explains why creating highly personalized web experiences leads to a better brand experience for users and better campaign results.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage and I’m here today with David Quin, Director of Brand and Communication Strategies at Center Point Energy. So David, welcome back to the show.

David: Robin, always glad to be here.

Robin: Well, wonderful. I love that you’re here again talking about the TrueCost portal, which is a great site that puts real power in the hands of the consumers in terms of their electricity shopping.

David: Thank you.

Robin: I want to know, how does that technology work. What makes the site so powerful?

David: We’ve really taken the website and based on our market research and what customers have told us they want, we’ve tried to highly personalize that experience. So the website does a couple of things that we haven’t found any other website in the market that does. First and foremost, it calculates the price of these plans to show you your true cost. So with your permission we can download your historic usage data and show you based on different plans how much each of them would cost for you. Secondly, the customers have told us that they don’t care about just one thing at a time and there are a lot of different customer types. So we’ve created a way to personalize your shopping results. So you’re actually able to tell us according to four different criteria – price, customer years in business, green energy plan and customer rating – how important those factors are to you. So we’ll then score the plan results and say, “Ah, based on your personalized criteria here’s the plans that best fit your preference.”

Robin: Well the site is powerful, and clearly it’s getting used from the consumer side with the marketing, but how many people are actually visiting the site now? How popular is this?

David: We’re averaging between 10,000 and 15,000 page views a day and the trend line on this is growing. So we’re very excited about the initial consumer response. We think we’ve built an easier, faster, smarter way to shop for electricity and so far customers at least through their page views seem to be telling us they agree.

Robin: That is very impressive data. I’m so glad they’re helping so many consumers with this new portal. So thank you again for sharing this on the show. Join us next week for another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

CenterPoint Energy is a domestic energy delivery company that includes electric transmission and distribution, natural gas distribution, interstate pipelines, field services, and competitive natural gas sales. The company’s vision is to be recognized as America’s leading energy delivery company… and more. https://www.centerpointenergy.com/

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Robin Tooms is a consultant for brand, marketing and communications strategies for B2B and service companies. Expertise includes corporate branding, investor communications, employee communications, social media, and marketing with emphasis on effective online marketing and use of technology.

Contact her at rtooms@savagebrands.com or reach her by phone at 713-522-1555.