As we approach CHARGE North America (18-19 May), we’ve been asking our top speakers and partners to reveal their approach to branding in energy. In this article, we speak to Rik Haslam, Executive Creative Partner, BRANDPIE
- What interests you most about energy brands today?
We love complex problems. Creating simple yet highly valuable strategic and creative solutions to the thorniest challenges is what energizes us.
Right now, the energy sector faces monumental challenge: from geopolitical shifts that mean the age of globalization is over and a bipolar world is rising, to the technological, infrastructure, supply chain and operating model issues that need addressing to successfully manage the transition to net zero.
It’s an immense privilege to be charged with helping leaders confront those challenges and transform their businesses, brands, and cultures to seize opportunity and thrive into the future.
- How do you see your clients building the business case for brand investment?
Simply put brand strategy must be connected to business strategy.
If the conversation is solely focused on marketing tactics, campaigns messaging, look and feel, and creative execution, then brand won’t be taken seriously in the boardroom.
All those things are important, but the essential task for marketers is to demonstrate to c-suite leaders how brand strategy will achieve two vital and inter-related tasks.
The first task is to show how the brand strategy will take the business strategy and translate it into an engaging story that aligns leadership behind a simple articulation of that strategy and helps customers, employees, and the market understand, value, and support it. The business value of doing those things is immense.
The second task is to demonstrate how a brand strategy that is built around a compelling definition of your organization’s purpose can simplify, accelerate and enable focused decision-making by giving leaders a single lens to help guide and filter every major decision – e.g. how well does a potential acquisition align with our purpose? Or, will a re-engineered employee experience help us attract key talent into the business?
Brandpie was born in the late noughties back when purpose wasn’t the buzzword it is today. At launch Brandpie were one of only a handful of consultancies specializing in purpose-driven transformation. Since then, Brandpie have been steadily helping C-suite teams super-charge business performance through purpose-led brand, culture, and sustainability services. Brandpie work with big global corporates, ambitious entrepreneurs, fast-growth start-ups, private equity portfolio companies, non-profits, and NGOs. They work with many firms in the energy sector and they’re likely best known for their recent work repositioning and rebranding SLB.
