Positioning • Branding • Strategy

A public utilities system in Louisiana wanted to determine its brand positioning among residential customers and needed to measure residents’ level of knowledge and awareness of deregulation issues.  The company turned to Saurage Research to recommend and develop a market research plan to measure the company’s current positioning and the community’s familiarity with deregulation.

Over a two-year period, Saurage Research conducted telephone surveys tracking the company’s positioning and performance of key service lines – electrical, water, and sewage – on several key attributes, such as reliability, cost, and customer service.

Results

It was determined that, at the time, familiarity with deregulation was very low and did not affect perceptions of the Utility System. Furthermore, the research revealed that evaluation of key service lines are affected by performance on different attributes, i.e. consumers use different criteria to evaluate electrical, water, and sewage services. Therefore, different message strategies are required for each service line.