In response to changing market dynamics, Essense Partners launched the industry’s Top 40 Utility PowerBrands ranking in 2017. This 2018 ranking of the best investor-owned electric utility brands is the result of a comprehensive investigation of over 200 measures of utility brand strength, categorized along four dimensions: brand identity, corporate narrative, customer experience and employee experience.

Managing corporate brands is tricky. It is both the least tangible and the most important asset that an organization possesses. Also, while it is relatively easy to influence customer brand perception through marketing and communications, it is difficult to measure the specific impact that any campaign has on brand reputation.

Compounding this issue for electric utility brands is the fact that the underlying marketplace is changing. As an electric utility, how do you create and maintain a winning brand when the marketplace itself is changing? The answer is to develop a dynamically robust brand where all of its strategic components reinforce each other and can propel the brand forward in a coherent way as marketplace needs change. We evaluate this propensity for dynamic robustness using our PowerBrands Score.

Congratulations to our 2018 winners.