SomeOne has been working to help a radical new idea take hold in the UK.
No one in their right mind would stick with a mortgage as it reaches the end of its deal. Everyone remortgages to get the best rate and avoid being ripped off by extortionate fees. Yet millions of people stick with terrible energy deals — for years.
Labrador has found a way to sort this, and we’ve found a way to give them a smarter strategic brand to do it with.
No, Labrador is not an energy company and they do not provide electricity or gas to households.
Labrador regularly monitors and compares the various tariff offerings across the broad UK energy market. Dull right?
Wrong,
When cheaper tariffs are found, they want to help users benefit from them. For free. For ever.
Smart.
Their switching service can sort an energy supplier switch on behalf of their customers, eliminating the burden of having to deal with a frequently complex & daunting task. (There are thousands of options available and they change, all the time).
‘The Team at SomeOne were brilliant in being able to bring fresh thinking to a space dominated by large brands with huge advertising resource. Our issue is less a lack of education about the benefits of switching, more cut through to get people to take the 90 seconds it takes to act. Thanks to the team it’s less ‘Why Labrador’ and more ‘Why wouldn’t you’, delivered in a way that is virtually impossible to ignore.’
Apathy.
That’s the energy companies greatest asset in their customers.
Most know they could be paying less, but simply can’t be bothered to change things up.
And it’s entirely understandable. Tariffs are deliberately complex to avoid customers easily moving from one deal to another.
But algorithms don’t get bored…
…and that’s what Labrador deploys on behalf of its community.
A quick, smart and personal search for the best deal, for as long as you want.
As soon as it finds a better deal, it switches you. You remain in control at all times, can change anything at any time and are able to see everything on a single page online.
No catch. Just a switch.
But… and it’s a big but… with people exhausted by the problem, they’ve all but given up trying to fight the power. (see what we did there?)
That’s where we came in. Previously the brand was informational — we’ve transformed it to be motivational.
Labrador is now grabbing the UK by the Bills and showing them that with a 2 minute spot of form-filling online — they are sorted. Forever. For free. (Yep, their bills get paid by the people who issue the bills, not the end consumer.)
We’ve worked with Labrador from the ground up, making sure the new brand work hits home at every instance.
‘I’ve been part of the masses who would rather watch my boiler pilot light quiver for hours, than wade through endless rate cards and tariff notices to save money. And significant money it is too. But when this brilliant idea came to our attention, I failed to see how anyone could pass it by. It’s been a delight to work with the progressive team at Labrador, and enormously exciting to see an organisation willing to not just talk a good game, but to see it through all the way to delivering a radical voice in a desperately vanilla sector’ Simon Manchipp, Founder, SomeOne.
According to a research finding by Ofgem, many UK residents stand to save around £300 annually on their energy bill if they haven’t recently switched.
This is simply due to the fact that the energy market in the UK constantly fluctuates with older tariffs removed and new ones added.
To guarantee cheap tariffs, it becomes necessary to review these new tariffs from different suppliers on a regular basis. For many of us, this is a very time consuming process and it’s frequently forgotten.
SomeOne has devised an entirely new visual and verbal operating system for the service, as well as a core brand strategy and relaunch advertising campaign.
Radical in the sector, the tone of voice, also created at SomeOne takes no chances.
It is super direct and clear as a bell.
Wake up.
Smell the electricity.
Enough is enough.
‘…The best way to encourage consumers to switch is to make it very, very easy for them to do so […] The technology has the power to overcome one of the most stubborn hurdles that prevents the development of a truly competitive energy market ‘
A full on and offline branding suite is now ready to be deployed across all channels.
We even devised a rather natty switch (this is a brand that LOVES switches) that enables the website itself to consume less energy.
Yep, one switch inverts the screen you are viewing the site on enabling everyone to choose to save energy immediately.
Google, gets about 3 billion queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 8,250,000 hours every day on some desktops somewhere. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode (they don’t but go with it), the shift to a black background will save a total of 225 watts. That turns into a global savings of 124.5 Megawatt-hours per day, or c45,000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that c25% of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $1,125,000, a serious amount of energy and money for changing a few colour codes.
Once the primary assets were developed, the brand was deployed digitally by the Labrador team through the user journey. From landing to signing-up, right through to the email in your inbox, it’s all been amplified by a striking visual language designed for digital touch points.
We’re lucky to meet a lot of new companies with great ambitions, but it was refreshing to meet the Labrador team. They are revolutionaries disguised as a website. We gave them an ownable language & disruptive uniform. Now they are impossible to ignore and ready to change the game.