Business Objective

• An electric utility wanted to establish a load management program and sought consumer input to understand participation interest, impact of monetary incentives, and expected support.
• Identifying messaging that would best motivate consumer adoption of the program was an important study objective.
• Additionally, the utility wanted to assess consumer understanding of how their individual behavior impacts the grid.

The Challenge

• It was important to the utility that insights would be gathered based on real-life customer experience.

Our Approach

• Schmidt recruited qualified utility customers to participate in a 4-week pilot program. Within that timeframe, those customers received text messages that encouraged reduced energy usage during a four-hour window on specified days.
• Participants were divided into four groups, each receiving different messaging and incentive levels. Energy usage was monitored during the pilot period.
• After the pilot period, participants received a follow-up survey asking them to share their experience and identify opportunities for program improvement.

Business Objective

• An electric utility wanted to create a resource center that would position their organization as a source of credible information on electric vehicles (EVs).

The Challenge

• Prior research conducted by this utility had indicated that consumers did not consider the utility as an information source for EVs.
• Based on these findings, branding and messaging were important objectives of the research.

Our Approach

• Schmidt leveraged the utility’s insight community to identify current and near-term prospective EV owners.
• An online survey was deployed and received more than 1,000 + responses, representing an above-average 24% response rate.
• Monadic survey design was used to evaluate four program names depicted with and without an EV logo (eight designs in total).