Nobody has ever fallen in love with a kilowatt

Ask a hundred energy customers what a kilowatt-hour actually is and most will give you a price, if they know it, but not a definition.

That is not a failure of education.

It is the design brief the energy sector has been ignoring for the past twenty years.

And it is becoming much harder to ignore.

The uncomfortable truth is that this problem goes far beyond energy. Insurance premiums, mobile data, loyalty points, interest rates and basis points on a savings account all share the same basic condition.

People pay for them every month.

Almost nobody can picture them.

A large part of modern life is built around invisible products, abstract systems and units nobody asked for and very few people truly understand.

For years, that did not matter very much.

These categories were not competing on understanding. They competed on price, inertia and the hope that changing provider would feel slightly more exhausting than staying where you were.

Confusion was not a bug.

It was part of the business model.

That era is now ending from two directions at once.

On one side, the product is becoming more complicated, not less.

Electrification. Dynamic tariffs. Electric vehicle charging. Solar. Batteries. Energy communities. Bundled services. Automated optimisation.

The energy customer of 2030 will be expected to make active decisions about things the energy customer of 2015 was barely shown.

At the same time, adjacent categories such as banking, telecom and insurance have spent the past decade trying to make invisible services feel simple, mostly through better digital experiences.

Their apps may not always be loved, but the standard has changed.

Customers now expect to see what they are paying for, understand what has changed and know what they can do next.

Any company still relying on “the customer does not need to understand it; they just need to pay for it” is going to look increasingly out of step.

This creates an opening.

And it is larger than most energy brands seem to realise.

The physical space.

Not because physical retail is inherently better than digital. For most transactions, it is not. An app should be faster at changing a tariff, checking consumption or updating an account.

But physical space can do something digital still struggles to do well.

It can make the invisible feel real.

A branch, a store or a counter can host the kind of conversation an app cannot. It can turn an abstract charge into something a person can see, compare, question and finally understand.

Right now, most energy spaces are wasting that opportunity.

Because they were designed for a job that no longer exists.

The space that forgot its job

For most of its history, physical retail in commodity sectors had one basic function: process the customer efficiently and let them leave.

That made sense when digital service was slow, confusing or unreliable. A five-minute conversation with a person behind a counter felt far better than waiting twenty minutes on the phone or trying to navigate a terrible website.

Then digital got better. It is what it is.

Once an app can change a tariff, file a claim or top up a plan faster than a human being, the counter loses its old purpose.

And yet the space often remains exactly the same.

A desk. A queue. A screen. A person processing something the customer could probably have done at home.

The room is still competing with software.

Software has already won.

This is why so many commodity retail environments feel tired even when nothing is technically wrong with them.

They are correct.

They are functional.

They are completely forgettable.

Nobody is necessarily doing the job badly.

The job simply stopped being the important one.

The new job is meaning.

It is taking something abstract — a tariff, a monthly charge, a contract, a set of conditions — and allowing someone to stand inside a physical translation of it for five minutes.

That is a very different brief from “serve the customer quickly.”

It asks for a space built around explanation, confidence and trust.

Not just throughput.

Three things a space needs to do, in this order

At Mormedi, working across sectors that share this exact problem, we keep arriving at the same three-part structure.

When the underlying product is invisible, a physical brand experience needs to do three things and the order matters.

Translate first

Nobody thinks in kilowatt-hours. Nobody thinks in basis points either. People think:

“Was this month more expensive than last month?”
“What happens if I change this one habit?”
“Why am I paying more?”
“What am I actually agreeing to?”

Translation does not mean simplifying the truth until it becomes meaningless. It means expressing the same truth in language the customer already understands.

A kilowatt-hour may be technically precise, but it is emotionally useless. A warm home for three hours is something a person can picture.

A tariff is abstract.

The difference between charging your car tonight or tomorrow afternoon is a decision. Do translation well and comprehension increases without removing a single important fact.

The information stays accurate.

It simply stops behaving as though the customer has a degree in energy markets.

Accompany second, and don't skip it

As these systems become smarter and more automated, companies often assume customers will naturally feel more in control.

Usually, the opposite happens.

Dynamic pricing. Algorithmic recommendations. Automatic switching. “We will optimise everything for you.”

All of it may be technically helpful.

But when the system makes more decisions, customers can feel like they are making fewer. This is where many brands over-automate. They assume removing friction is always an improvement.

Often, it is. But not always.

Sometimes a small deliberate moment of friction is exactly what gives control back to the customer.

A pause. A visible choice. A human checkpoint. A moment where the system explains what it is about to do before doing it.

The easiest experience is not automatically the most reassuring one and in a category built around monthly bills, changing prices and invisible consumption, reassurance can be more valuable than saving another eight seconds.

Accompanying the customer means making it clear that they are still driving. Even when the system is doing most of the work.

Activate third

Understanding something and acting on it are not the same outcome.

Most communication strategies stop after the explanation. They show the customer a chart. Explain the tariff. Offer a recommendation.

Then they ask them to remember it later.

“Open the app tonight.”
“Visit the website when you get home.”
“Scan this QR code.”
“Think about changing the plan next month.”

This is where physical space has a real advantage. It can turn understanding into action immediately, in the same place and at the same moment.

The customer understands why charging at a different time would save money.

Then they change the setting.

They see how solar and storage could work in their home.

Then they book the assessment.

They compare two tariffs.

Then they switch.

No second journey.

No good intention waiting to be forgotten.

The moment of clarity becomes the moment of action. Get this sequence right and something interesting happens.

The brand stops being a logo printed at the top of a bill. It becomes an experience the customer can actually remember.

In categories where the underlying product is difficult to differentiate, that memory matters.

A LOT!

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What happens to the brands that do not move?

There is another option.

Energy companies can continue competing almost entirely on price and inertia. They can keep betting that confusion is stable, profitable and difficult enough to challenge.

For a while, that bet may work.

Confusion is sticky.

Switching costs, both real and imagined, do a lot of work on a company’s behalf.

People stay because leaving sounds complicated.

They renew because comparing alternatives feels exhausting.

They pay because they do not quite understand what they are paying for.

But confusion is a waiting room.

It is not a strategy.

The moment one competitor proves that understanding is possible, the category changes.  

One brand explains the bill clearly.

One insurer makes the conditions tangible.

One bank makes interest understandable.

One energy provider allows customers to see what their choices actually mean.

And the customers who finally understand do not reward the years they spent confused. They reward clarity. Then they look for it everywhere else.

Once one energy brand makes this shift convincingly, the others are not simply behind in marketing. They are behind in trust. And trust takes much longer to rebuild than an app.

The opportunity exists now precisely because very few companies have claimed this territory.

The sector still behaves as if differentiation happens mainly through tariffs, digital tools and loyalty programmes.

It does.

But not only there.

It is also happening during the five minutes a customer spends in a physical space trying to understand what they are actually paying for.

Right now, that moment is largely unclaimed.

Nobody is ever going to fall in love with a kilowatt-hour. But someone will be the first energy brand to make a customer feel, for the first time, that they finally understand one.

That is not a minor improvement to the customer journey. It is the beginning of an entirely different relationship with the category.

And it is available to whoever moves first.

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