Corona Energy is a leading independent gas and electricity supplier with more than 25 years experience in the UK B2B market.
The vast majority of Corona Energy’s business comes via independent brokers who specialise in servicing the B2B market, typically using online price comparison tools to offer their customers the best deal in the marketplace. In their eyes, they own the customer relationship and they demonstrate their value across the customer lifecycle by helping identify and negotiate the strongest deal at each renewal interval.
Based on this market structure, the assumption at Corona Energy was that this decision-making process for brokers was purely functional and transactional … cheapest price wins the customer … but they wanted to test this and understand more deeply the decision-making journey of brokers to identify where there may be opportunities to best position Corona Energy and optimise the broker and customer proposition.
OUR APPROACH
We designed and conducted a B2B research process based on in-depth face to face interviews with brokers representing the different segments of the market. The research was carefully designed to explore both the rational / functional aspects of the broker sales process as well as using projective and metaphor-elicitation techniques to help elicit deeper emotional motivations which may also affect broker recommendations.
RESULTS
At the annual Corona Energy Broker Day we were invited to share the key insights from the research, including the ‘hidden’ factors we discovered which also influence broker decision-making and supplier recommendation. These learnings have subsequently been used to refine the Corona Energy broker offer and communications.