- What is the background to Peak Power’s purpose ‘Let’s make dirty power plants obsolete’?
We tried to boil down to the most concrete result if Peak Power, our customers, and partners were successful in our goal of wide adoption of distributed energy resources. Something everyone could understand. What exactly does it mean to the ordinary person if we were to create a more decarbonized and democratized energy system? At a basic level, it would mean that we could decommission dirty power plants because we would have a system that didn’t have as much peak demand and was able to support more renewables. We liked the imagery of the dirty, smoke spewing power plant because everyone has a vision of that in their heads, no matter your age or understanding of the energy system. Most people don’t have a positive association with it.
- What role does purpose play in driving Peak Power’s strategy?
Our purpose makes us stand apart from our competition whether it’s for customers, talent, funding, etc. The idea of making dirty power plants is sticky. In our industry, it’s provocative. It also gives us a north star to point towards. Everything we do should revolve around driving the adoption of distributed energy resources. It forces us to focus, whether it’s our product development, our services, which partnerships we pursue, or our messaging.
- What lessons have you learned about simplifying complex concepts/technologies for branding and communications?
We’ve learned that people rarely respond to something when they don’t understand its value for them. At the core, your audience is going to want to know what’s in it for them, and they’re not going to want to put a lot of effort to figure that out. It’s our job to communicate our value proposition in a way they find engaging.
In terms of actually doing the work, we’ve learned that we need to understand a concept forwards and backwards, up and down, in order to simplify it. It takes a lot of time and a lot of conversations with our subject matter experts. There’s a reason lots of companies have messaging that’s product-centric and very technical. It’s easy. You don’t have to take the extra step of locking some engineers and communications folks in a room and make them talk for hours until they understand each other.
- What is the general perception of the brand within your business versus how it was a few years ago? How has it changed, and what are your hopes for your brand in the next few years?
As with most younger companies, brand took a backseat to product development and sales. We didn’t have a dedicated marketing department until almost 3 years ago. And before we established our purpose, we were pretty unfocused about our company’s identity and product offering. In the last couple of years, we’ve done a great job at narrowing and defining who we are and what we do. We dropped some product offerings that weren’t in line with our purpose and were taking up precious resources without delivering a lot of value.
In the next few years, I really hope to develop the voice of our brand. The B2B energy space can be quite stodgy, and we want to bring some levity to it without compromising our credibility as energy professionals.
- What advice would you leave brand and marketing leaders thinking of applying for the 2023/24 CHARGE Awards? Do you have any tips or a story to share about winning?
Be honest, tell a story, and keep it simple. Remember that the judges are people, probably really busy people, and they don’t want to read a bunch of long, dry entries. Something that I think helped our entry was the fact that we were willing to share our failures. We made a lot of bad calls, which is common in the tech space, but most companies seem unwilling to speak openly about them. But the bad calls – more specifically, finding the lessons in them – is what led to our successes. Nobody cares about the person born with a silver spoon in their mouth who hit it big. Everyone loves an underdog.
- Please tell us more about Peak Power and your current work with energy providers and the building sector.
Peak Power is a cleantech company that deploys, operates, optimizes, and maintains energy storage systems. We were founded under the belief that battery energy storage has the potential to transform the energy sector. With the right technology, we can store energy when it’s cheap, clean, and abundant to use when the grid is dirty, expensive, or intermittent.
By focusing on software solutions that forecast grid events and aggregate distributed energy resources, Peak Power is helping industrial and manufacturing facilities, large commercial buildings, and independent power producers get greater returns from their investments and pursue net zero goals.
Are you a future winner of the B2B Energy Innovator of the Year?
This award is for disruptive market entrants leveraging new technologies and/or ideas to transform the status quo. This category looks for true energy innovators who have leveraged cutting-edge solutions to empower their customers. What’s more, we’re hunting for companies that are developing the innovations needed to deliver and scale up the energy transition. If you qualify or would like to nominate an organization, please submit a nomination at https://charge.events/categories/.
