"Green transition" and "sustainable future" have been on the agenda for many years. Yet for many people, climate-smart electrification, including e-mobility, is just a vague promise of the future. Consumers' perception of E.ON was no exception – few people saw E.ON as a company that makes things happen (YouGov, 2019). In addition, many people felt insecure around electric cars and charging boxes: ”How, and from whom, do I buy the charging box?”; ”Are there enough charging stations?”; ”Is it difficult to use the charging box?”

Brief: An idea that differentiates E.ON from the competitors, builds the brand in both existing and new audiences, views E.ON as a driving force within e-mobility and last but not least, sells charging boxes.

Goals:

• Drive growth in the Charging box segment (Sales+Top of Mind)

• Increase liking for the E.ON brand

Instead of just building a ton of charging points, we wanted to inspire people to share their private charging box with others. That way we could “build” new public charging “stations” all over Sweden and add them to the E.ON Drive application.

Said and done. To show people how easy it was, we created the first, full service, non-profit, electric gas station in the world, on a private farm in suburban Malmö. At Olssons

Elmack people could swing by, grab a cup of coffee and lunch, whilst charging their cars using a charging box from E.ON. Our goal was to start by grabbing the attention of local media, before moving on to the national stage. With this in mind we created a really low-budget campaign, consisting of home-made road signs, direct advertising and organic SoMe content. And after a few days the two biggest local papers picked up the story.

A big energy company like E.ON has most of Sweden as a target audience, so we knew we needed something with a big impact in order to reach as many as possible. We also knew that Swedish media would be reluctant to write a story that’s directly related to a big brand like E.ON. But we felt we really needed earned media attention before launching our campaign in paid media. So we created and launched a new brand (Olssons Elmack), with no apparent connection to E.ON, in order to carry the message. And then we gave that brand its own marketing channels to communicate and get media attention.

We started off by launching our completely new service, allowing anyone to share their charging box directly in the E.ON Drive app. Then, we let an ordinary family – The Olsson’s – open up the world’s first full service electric gas station on their private farm outside of Malmö, Sweden.

After getting The Olsson electric gas station published in local and national earned media, we started the second phase of the campaign, letting E.ON capitalize on the buzz in paid channels (TV commercials, Outdoor, Radio, Print ads and SoMe). The campaign mainly consisted of a large number of fictitious electric gas station brands, demonstrating the fact that ANYONE can join the e-mobility movement!

In order to not only build the E.ON brand, but also drive charging box sales, we made sure to push the customers to our campaign site in as many touchpoints as possible.

- Top of mind in segment +133% (from 3% to 7%). Clear market leader for the first time

- Brand perception +81% (from 2,7 to 4,9, YouGov Brand Index)

- Beat the sales goals by 54% (charging boxes)

- Awareness, retailer of charging boxes + 45% (from 22% to 32%)

- 9+ million earned media impressions (the population in Sweden is 10 million)

- Olssons Electric Gas Station managed to get an over 3 minute long interview in the two biggest channels in public radio (P3 & P4), and trended on Reddit.

- During the campaign period, E.ON became the most searched brand on google with the keywords ”laddbox” (charging box) and ”skaffa laddbox” (buy charging box). We even managed to launch a new word – "Elmack" – which received as many searches as "charging box" during the campaign period. 100% of these searches ended up at to E.ON’s webbsite.