The next energy brand won't open a store; it will borrow someone else's

There is already a retail category that has solved almost every problem the energy sector is still struggling with.

And it is not another utility.

It is the phone shop on the corner.

‍

Telecom retailers sell something recurring, invisible and mildly confusing: data, minutes, bundles, roaming, contract terms. Things customers need, pay for every month and would generally prefer not to think about.

Sound familiar?

Yet telecom has spent the past two decades learning how to sell all of that through physical retail. Its staff can explain a complicated tariff in one sentence, switch a customer to a new plan in ten minutes and, occasionally, sell them something they had no intention of buying when they walked in.

It has the footprint. It has the foot traffic. But more importantly, it has already created the habit.

People think nothing of walking into a phone store on a Saturday to sort out a recurring monthly service. It feels completely normal.

Energy has almost none of that muscle memory.

Most people have never voluntarily visited an energy provider’s physical space. When they do, it is usually because something has gone wrong. They arrive confused, frustrated or already expecting a fight.

Compare that with a telecom store, where someone can wander in to look at a new handset and leave having upgraded a contract they were not planning to touch.

The difference is not really the product.

It is the behaviour that each category has trained its customers to accept.

Telecom has spent decades making the physical visit feel normal. Energy is still trying to convince people that it needs a physical presence in the first place.

And this matters because energy has another problem: it is extremely difficult to differentiate.

Electricity from one provider does not feel different from electricity supplied by another. Customers cannot touch it, test it or compare it on a shelf. Once the service works, the brand often disappears behind the bill.

That leaves price doing far too much of the work.

A cheaper tariff. A welcome discount. A temporary promotion. A comparison-site ranking.

The customer arrives because the price moved.

And leaves when it moves again.

What energy brands often call loyalty is really inertia: customers staying because changing provider feels more complicated than doing nothing.

That is not the same as preference.

And it is certainly not a relationship.

So perhaps the question is not how energy brands can build a new retail category from scratch.

Perhaps it is why they are still trying.

Why invest enormous amounts of time and money teaching customers a new behaviour when a mature, trusted and high-frequency retail format selling almost exactly the same kind of thing already exists two doors down?

Convergence is coming whether the industry plans for it or not

The lazy version of this idea has already been tried.

A co-branded flyer left on a counter. A QR code stuck to a window. A partnership announced in a press release that no customer ever notices.

Energy becomes an extra leaflet beside the phone cases.

And customers treat it accordingly.

The version worth building is not a promotional partnership.

It is a genuinely integrated proposition.

Energy needs to become native to the bundle from day one: sold with the same fluency as a mobile plan, explained by staff trained to make it understandable and presented within a format customers already recognise as the place where they sort these things out.

Not hidden in the corner.

Not added afterwards.

Built into the experience.

Because this is bigger than one telecom and one energy provider sharing a space.

Energy, telecom, insurance and banking have spent decades behaving as if they belong to completely different categories.

From the customer’s point of view, they increasingly do not.

‍

A phone contract, an energy tariff and an insurance renewal can all arrive in the same week. They create the same low-level dread. They demand the same reluctant fifteen minutes of attention. And they are usually dealt with in exactly the same way: as monthly obligations that need to be managed before they become more expensive.

Customers have already bundled these categories mentally.

The industries are the ones still pretending they are unrelated.

A bundle can create what the individual product cannot. This is where bundling becomes more than a cross-selling tactic.

On its own, energy gives customers relatively few reasons to interact with a brand. The relationship is largely invisible until the bill arrives or something goes wrong.

A broader bundle changes the frequency and shape of that relationship.

The customer may visit to replace a phone, ask about broadband, review their insurance or solve a problem with their home services. Energy becomes part of a relationship that already contains more visible, frequent and understandable moments.

And each additional service creates another reason to stay.

Not simply because leaving becomes harder, although companies have often designed bundles that way.

But because staying can become genuinely more useful.

‍

One account.

One place to ask questions.

One person who can explain how the different services connect.

One relationship managing a larger part of the home.

This is a stronger form of differentiation than offering another nearly identical tariff with a slightly different name.

The energy product itself may remain interchangeable.

The relationship around it does not have to be.

A well-designed bundle can move the customer from buying a commodity to relying on an ecosystem.

That can create loyalty, but only when the value of the bundle is visible.

Customers need to understand what they gain by bringing these services together. Simpler management. Better advice. More relevant recommendations. Fewer disconnected decisions.

Otherwise, the bundle becomes little more than a collection of contracts tied together to make leaving inconvenient.

That is not loyalty.

That is captivity with a discount.

The brands that succeed will be the ones that use the bundle to make the customer’s life simpler, not merely their exit more difficult.

Differentiation moves from product to relationship

The brand that gets there first in each market will not necessarily win because it has the smartest app, the lowest introductory tariff or the sharpest new logo.

It will win because it appears inside a retail relationship the customer already trusts for this kind of decision.

Because it connects services that previously felt fragmented.

And because the customer leaves understanding not only what they have bought, but why keeping those services together is useful.

In a market where the product is almost impossible to differentiate, the experience surrounding it becomes the product.

‍

The explanation.

The convenience.

The physical access.

The human support.

The ability to solve several related problems in one conversation.

That should not feel revolutionary.

In energy, it still does.

‍

But can your brand survive contact with someone else’s shop floor?

This is where the idea becomes more difficult.

Designing a brilliant concept for one flagship space you control is relatively easy. You choose the location, approve every material, train every member of staff and obsess over the position of every screen.

Making that same brand experience work inside a hundred different partner locations is something else entirely.

Each store has a different footprint. Different staff. Different customers. Different operational constraints. Different furniture that someone, somewhere, has already decided cannot be moved.

And by location number twelve, the beautiful concept presented at headquarters has often become a sticker, a brochure holder and a screen showing the wrong content.

This is the real challenge of convergence.

Not creating the idea.

Keeping it alive once it leaves your building.

Because if the energy proposition becomes invisible inside the partner’s store, the bundle loses the very thing that was meant to differentiate it.

The customer may remember where they bought their phone.

They may not remember who supplies their energy.

And a brand that cannot be remembered cannot create loyalty, however many services appear on the same invoice.

The instinctive response is almost always more control: a thicker brand-guidelines document, another layer of approval and a stricter sign-off process.

It feels responsible.

It usually makes the problem worse.

A rulebook designed entirely to catch mistakes optimises for one outcome: preventing anything from going wrong.

But it also prevents anything interesting from happening locally.

When every deviation is treated as a threat, local teams stop trying to solve the problem in front of them. Their job becomes avoiding violations.

Follow the manual. Do not improvise. Do not make the call.

And certainly, do not do anything that might require a difficult email to headquarters.

The answer is not to remove the rules.

It is to become much clearer about which rules actually matter.

A scalable brand system needs a short list of genuine non-negotiables: the core identity, the tone of voice and the essential shape of the experience a customer should recognise wherever they encounter it.

Everything else should have room to adapt.

The layout. The materials. The size. The format. The details that only make sense once you understand the local context.

Consistency does not mean making every location identical.

It means ensuring they all feel related.

Central validation still has a role in this model, but its job changes. Instead of policing every deviation, it helps local teams solve genuine questions quickly.

More importantly, it captures what works.

Because when one market develops a good response to a real problem, that idea should not die in the store where it was invented.

It should become the answer that the next hundred locations do not need to reinvent.

This is the part most governance models miss.

Most organisations have a system for stopping bad ideas.

Very few have a system for remembering good ones.

Two shifts. One design challenge.

Put these forces together and the direction becomes clearer.

Energy retail will continue moving beyond the walls of traditional energy companies.

Into telecom stores.

Into shared service hubs.

Into partner locations.

Into formats that look less like sponsorship and more like genuine co-location.

At the same time, energy brands need to move beyond price as their main source of differentiation.

A well-designed bundle gives them that opportunity.

It creates a wider relationship with the customer, more frequent reasons to interact and a value proposition that cannot be reduced to the price of a single kilowatt-hour.

But that loyalty will not appear automatically.

The brands that scale successfully will be the ones that make the combined proposition understandable, valuable and recognisable across every place it appears.

They will also be the ones that stop trying to control every detail and start designing systems capable of learning from their own networks.

The boundaries between energy, telecom, insurance and banking are softening because customer behaviour crossed them years ago.

And any brand attempting to occupy multiple physical formats — its own stores, a partner’s corner, a temporary pop-up or a digital service counter — without a system designed for adaptation will fragment faster than it expands.

Energy companies often treat this as separate questions:

How do we get into more physical locations?

How do we differentiate beyond price?

How do we build loyalty?

And how do we keep the brand consistent while doing all three?

They are not separate questions.

They are one design challenge.

Solve them together, and physical retail stops being the energy sector’s weakest and most neglected channel.

It becomes a way to transform a commodity into a relationship.

A bundle into something genuinely useful.

And customer inertia into something much harder to build:

A customer who understands what they are buying.

Values what they receive by keeping it together.

And actively chooses to stay.

‍