EV charging infrastructure · UK, Germany, France · 2023

ChargePoint: turning commissioned research into a segment nobody was addressing

SECTOR

EV charging infrastructure

MARKET

UK, Germany, France

COMPANY

ChargePoint

ROLE APPLIED FOR

Segment Marketing

DATE

Oct 2023

Data & API

The situation

Less than 1% of UK office buildings had EV charging infrastructure. The market research existed. The segment strategy didn't.

ChargePoint had commissioned Mordor Intelligence research on EV charging in European commercial real estate. The exercise was to turn it into audiences, messaging and a campaign, the gap between a research report and something a marketing team can execute.

01 · What this engagement produced

5 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

Lead with the landlord's arithmetic, not the emissions argument.

Commercial real estate is not an environmental buyer. It's a yield buyer. Transport being a quarter of UK CO2 emissions is true, motivating for policymakers, and not what gets a charger installed in an office car park.

What gets it installed is tenant demand, competitive differentiation against the building down the road, and a payback period that clears the hurdle rate. So the messaging had to run on installation cost, maintenance cost and ROI range, with sustainability as the reason the tenant demand exists rather than as the pitch.

03 · What I wasn't given

Landlords interviewed

Research report

Markets

Not givenThe research was commissioned. The segment strategy wasn't, and neither was any contact with a person who actually approves a car park refit.

04 · The work

3 moves

A research report, turned into something executable.

01Extract the numbers that matter

01 Research

Market sizing for the three priority countries: the UK at $31.4M growing to $46.7M by 2028 at 6.83% CAGR, Germany at $35.5M to $53.4M at 7.05%, France at $8.1M to $11.3M at 5.58%
Each with its macro context, and the unit economics a building owner actually faces: substation costs, per-charger installation, annual maintenance and payback range
Less than 1% of UK office buildings had charging infrastructure, which is the whole opportunity in one number

02Turn a report into audiences

03 Segment, position & price

The audiences a commercial-real-estate campaign should target, drawn out of the research rather than assumed
An executive summary written for the people who would never read the full report, which is most of the people who have to act on it

03Message and campaign

04 Message · 05 Launch & enable

Segment messaging split by asset: whitepapers, advertising, thought leadership
A campaign outline across audiences, geographies, messaging and channels

Where I pushed back

There isn't one, and that's the problem with this case.

Every other brief on this site has a moment where I disagreed with the premise. This one doesn't. I took a commissioned research report and turned it into audiences, messaging and a campaign, competently, and without ever asking whether the research was answering the right question.

The one place I moved off the brief was refusing the emissions framing in favour of payback arithmetic, and that is a copy decision rather than a strategic one. Noticing the absence is more useful to me than manufacturing one after the fact.

05 · What I'd change

This is the weakest of my teardowns and I'd rather say so than pad it. It's competent synthesis of someone else's research, and it doesn't contain an original strategic argument the way the Sumsub or WalletConnect work does. If I rebuilt it I'd interview three property managers first. The whole thing rests on assumptions about landlord decision-making that were never tested against a landlord.

What happened next

PARTLY

The argument survived. The seller's position didn't.

Oct 2023

I presented this. Less than 1% of UK office buildings had charging infrastructure.

Jul 2025

ChargePoint carried out a 1-for-20 reverse stock split, intended to lift its share price and keep it inside the minimum trading price criteria for continued listing on the NYSE. ChargePoint investor relations

Today

The company reports more than a million chargers across the US and Europe.

Nothing in the segment argument has been contradicted. Office car parks are still mostly empty of chargers, and a landlord still buys on payback rather than on emissions. If anything, a harder capital market makes the arithmetic framing more necessary.

What changed is the seller. A company defending a listing has a very different relationship with a long-payback infrastructure segment than one with capital to deploy, and a segment strategy that quietly assumes patient investment is worth almost nothing to it. That is precisely what a research report can't tell you, and it is why the note above says I should have interviewed three property managers. Fieldwork is what tells you whether a segment is slow, and slow is what kills it.

The brief, as it was set

Brief set by ChargePoint

October 2023

Segment Marketing, take-home

Review the market research we commissioned on EV charging in European commercial real estate. Produce the audiences, the segment messaging and a campaign outline.

Summarised from the brief. The commissioned research itself is not reproduced anywhere on this page.

What I wasn't given

Landlords interviewed

Research report

Markets

Not givenThe research was commissioned. The segment strategy wasn't, and neither was any contact with a person who actually approves a car park refit.

Set by the company.