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Environmental commodities · Europe and the United States · 2021

CerQlar: a brand for a platform that didn't exist yet, and the audience I refused

SECTOR

Environmental commodities

MARKET

Europe and the United States

COMPANY

CerQlar

FORMAT

Two-page brand strategy

DATE

February 2021

ClimateData & API

The situation

CerQlar was being built to automate the settlement of environmental commodities: renewable energy certificates, guarantees of origin, and the rest of the paperwork that proves a unit of clean energy was produced and retired.

The markets are fragmented across national and state registries, most of which had to be worked by hand.

The platform had not launched and the brand did not exist. There was no logo, no tagline, no voice and no customer. What there was: a parent company with an established sales force, a real operational pain its own back office felt every day, and a business plan aimed at everyone from professional traders down to households.

01 · What this engagement produced

4 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what the brief produced. Dashed is what it did not reach, and could not from outside.

02 · The decision

One audience, chosen before any of the brand was written.

The business plan's ladder, large enterprises in the obligatory market, large enterprises wanting a green image, SMEs, then households, is a reasonable sequence for a product and an impossible one for a brand. Every one of those groups needs a different first sentence.

Crossing the chasm is a question you can only answer by choosing. So I chose: high-growth tech startups and SMEs trying to go green, positioned on simple, low cost, complete, and reached through e-CRM rather than through the enterprise sales motion. Everything else, the voice, the content, the SEO structure, the channel mix, was written for them and for nobody else.

03 · What I wasn't given

2

Pages

1

Feature to pick

0

Customers, at the time

Not givenNo brand, no logo, no voice, no launched product. A business plan, and a parent company's sales force.

04 · The work

5 moves

Five moves, two pages.

01Define the brand from the top down

03 Segment, position & price

  • Vision: achieve global sustainability by making climate action accessible for everyone
  • Essence, kept internal: empower everyone to take climate action
  • Tagline: take climate action now
  • Personality placed deliberately, not described: sincerity and competence rather than excitement or sophistication, with the togetherness archetype inherited from the parent company, and a professional, ambitious voice
  • USP written as a sentence a salesperson could actually say: the global platform that enables efficient settlement of environmental commodities
02A colour system with reasons attached

04 Message

  • Three colours, each chosen for what it signals rather than for how it looks
  • Typography direction: a clean, minimal sans serif
  • Logo specified against criteria rather than described: simple, memorable, unique, timeless, versatile and scalable

The palette, and why

Base

Jade green

#00a86b

Trust, tactfulness, generosity, wisdom, understanding

Accent

ACT blue

#37506e

Loyalty, trust and integrity, reliability and responsibility, perseverance

Background

Off white

#f8f8ff

A neutral tone, less intense and less sterile than pure white

Three colours, three reasons. A palette without an argument is decoration.

03Four buyers, almost no shared channels

03 Segment, position & price

  • Four personas, each with an occupation, a motivation and its own channel list
  • The point of the exercise was the channel column: a head of CSR is reached through conferences, sales and industry press, and a condominium director is reached through television and social
  • Which is the argument against one campaign, made without having to state it

Four buyers

Four motivations. Almost no overlapping channels.

Head of CSR, large media company

Rebrand the company as green, against a UN sustainable development goal

Conferences, sales, SEO, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, industry magazines, print, email

VP operations, energy company

Has to meet renewable energy targets and offset carbon emissions

Sales, conferences, SEO, LinkedIn, YouTube, industry magazines, podcasts, print, email

The one with the budget

General manager, frozen vegetables plant

Switch to renewable energy and lead by example

SEO, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, tech magazines, print

Doctor and condominium association director

Simply wants to take action against climate change

TV, SEO, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, print

One campaign was never going to reach all four.

04SEO as a structure

05 Launch & enable

  • One long-form guide per high-level topic, briefly touching the subtopics beneath it
  • Blog posts against long-tail phrases underneath, linked back to the guide, the topic cluster model
  • The argument for low-volume terms made plainly: a phrase searched ten times a month is worth writing for if all ten searchers are buyers
  • Bottom-of-funnel calls to action on the posts, internal links to product pages, external link building, and region-specific content in multiple languages for Europe
  • Worked end to end on renewable energy certificates as the example, rather than left as a method
05Cross the chasm by naming who's on the other side

03 Segment, position & price

  • Early majority segment named: high-growth tech startups and SMEs trying to go green
  • Positioning for them: simple, low cost, complete solution
  • Channel: e-CRM
  • And the one feature the brief asked me to pick, framed for them as Track, Choose, Neutralize with easy onboarding and a choice of solutions

Crossing it

Innovators

Early adopters

Chasm

Early majority

Late majority

Laggards

High-growth tech startups and SMEs going green

  • Simple
  • Low cost
  • Complete solution
  • Reached through e-CRM

The brief asked how to cross it. The only answer is to name who's standing on the other side.

Where I pushed back

I narrowed a plan that was written to be broad.

The business plan's ambition was the whole ladder, from professional traders down to households, and it had a good reason: automation is exactly what makes the low end reachable at all. I still narrowed it.

A brand aimed at everyone has to be written in language general enough to fit a trading desk and a homeowner, and that language is always worse than either specific version. The brief asked about the chasm, and the chasm is crossed by picking. So I picked, and accepted that the strategy would be wrong for four fifths of the plan's stated audience.

05 · What I'd change

I picked the wrong end of the ladder, and the reason I picked it is instructive. I optimised for the segment that was easiest to describe rather than the one with the most acute pain. The traders and utilities were harder to write for and were living with the problem daily. Choosing one segment was right; I should have chosen it on pain rather than on addressability.

What happened next

PARTLY

They narrowed. They narrowed the other way.

Feb 2021

I presented this. CerQlar had not launched, and the plan targeted everyone from large enterprises to households.

Today

CerQlar operates from Amsterdam as a Green Trade and Risk Management platform for energy companies and renewable energy traders, on a subscription model, with named customers in European energy and certification. cerqlar.com

Today

The homepage line is "Track, manage, & automate your EAC-settlement — the easy way", and the site runs a Learn section. cerqlar.com

The direction was right and the destination wasn't. I said stop selling to everyone and choose one segment, and they did, but they went up the ladder to traders and utilities rather than down to green-minded SMEs. That is the better call. The professional segment has the volume, the daily pain and the budget, and the mass market I was aiming at still does not buy environmental commodities directly.

Two things did survive, and both are structural rather than cosmetic. They named a category for themselves rather than competing inside someone else's. And the first verb on their homepage is still Track, sitting in front of a simplicity promise, which is where I put it.

The brief, as it was set

Brief set by CerQlar

February 2021

Two pages

Create a two page brand communication strategy for the new market launch based on the information that has been shared, and pick one of the key features of the platform and highlight how it can meet client demands for a particular segment or industry vertical.

To cover

CerQlar's role related to large socio-economic trends such as climate change. Content strategy and media channels, especially for B2B early stage rather than mass market. SEO strategy related to content. Community building. How to close the chasm between innovators and early adopters and the early and late majority.

I was also given the internal business plan. Its market sizing, financials and commercial arrangements are not reproduced anywhere on this page.

What I wasn't given

2

Pages

1

Feature to pick

0

Customers, at the time

Not givenNo brand, no logo, no voice, no launched product. A business plan, and a parent company's sales force.

Set by the company.