What energy retailers can learn from prospect theory, voter studies, and a golden retriever

A cartoon stick figure named Toni cut paper towel use in a German bathroom more than any guilt trip ever has. A single word swap; ‘voter’ instead of ‘vote’ moved a US election by 11 points. People will pay real money to keep a button they’ll never press.

What can this teach us about getting people to download an energy app? More than you’d think. 

1. Lead with losses

Every energy app store screenshot in Europe says some version of ‘Save €240 a year.’ It’s the most persistent headline in the category, and it’s…fine, really, but it leaves some money on the table. 

Ghesla, Grieder, Schmitz & Stadelmann (Energy Policy, 2020) ran a field experiment in which loss-framed pro-environmental incentives reduced electricity consumption by about 5% versus the control group, a notably larger effect than gain-framed equivalents. Prospect theory, the underlying mechanism, says losses register roughly twice as motivating as gains of the same size. 

Caveat: don't punch down. There’s a difference between ‘you’re losing €240 a year’ and ‘you, personally, are setting fire to twenty-euro notes in your own kitchen, you absolute donut.’ One is a customer service call and possibly a regulator email. 

Time you put some copy to the mighty A/B test. 

2. Use named, specific peer examples

‘Our customers save up to 20%’ has been serving time in the marketing-cliché penitentiary since 2007 (where Sales keeps asking Marketing to make slides pretty) and shows no signs of rehabilitation.

The fix is a specifically picturable person.

Mundt and colleagues (Frontiers in Psychology, 2024) ran five field experiments based on the ‘Be like Bill’ social media meme with a stick figure named Toni demonstrating good behaviour in public restrooms. In a German university bathroom, Toni cut paper towel use at an effect size of d = 0.48. At a German Christmas market, the result replicated at d = 0.32. A laminated drawing of a fictional stranger named Toni outperformed signage, statistics, and the moral pressure of being watched by a human in the queue.

Copy suggestions: ‘Anna in Hamburg saved €340 last winter on her two-bed flat with the same heating, same routine, smarter schedule.’ Or: ‘Marcus in Leipzig switched in March and now pays €47 less a month than the neighbour with the identical boiler.’ Or: ‘Lena, two kids, 1970s flat in Lundby cut her bill by 22% without buying anything new.’

3. Cast characters 

Optimize. Monetize. Manage. The holy trinity of energy decks signal performance with faint Patrick Bateman vibes. Energy as something you stack between the cold plunge and the protein shake.

This isn’t only aesthetic. Research on home retrofit decision-making consistently finds men leading on supplier choice, supervision, and budget control, while women, who often carry more of the day-to-day energy use, defer to their partner on the strategic calls. 

The lazy response would be to flip the gender of the customer in the brand video and call it a strategy refresh. That move produces the following commercial, done approximately forty times:

A woman, mid-thirties, in beige linen, stands in a sunlit kitchen, because all kitchens in commercials face east at nine a.m. forever. A golden retriever pads through frame. Two children, boy and girl, bolt past laughing. There is sourdough on the counter, because of course there is. She touches a houseplant for no narrative reason. She lifts her phone. Soft whoosh. The app opens to a dashboard. Cut to solar panels, drone shot, suspiciously clean. Cut back to her at the window gazing into the distance, holding a mug she is not drinking from. Voiceover, David Attenborough-style: Sara takes care of her family’s energy. She smiles at nobody. The dog smiles back. Logo. One word in lowercase.

The fix is a different pitch entirely. An influential PNAS study found that asking people whether it was important to them to ‘be a voter’ rather than to ‘vote’ (a single noun-versus-verb shift) increased turnout by nearly 11 percentage points in a US state election. Nouns let people claim an identity. Verbs are just things they occasionally have to do.

So what identity does your app let someone claim? ‘The neighbour whose electricity bill is low and refuses to elaborate.’ ‘The one in the friend group everyone texts before switching the electricity contract.’ ‘The household member who has said ‘turn that off’ three times today.’ ‘The parent who says ‘are you cold? put a jumper on’ before touching the thermostat.’

4. In a world where everyone wants to be a Tamagotchi, be the Roomba

This one’s uncomfortable for product teams measured on DAU, but customers want to engage less and trust that things are handled. 

Marketing that promises ‘set it up once, never think about it again’ tests better than ‘manage your energy daily’ in nearly every category and the data backs it up. A Centre for Net Zero trial of over 13,000 UK households showed AI-managed EV charging cut annual bills by £650 and reduced peak household electricity use by 42%, all without any behaviour change required from drivers. A separate Rivian dataset found that fewer than 26% of charging sessions are actively scheduled to align with tariffs. People want the savings without the homework. 

But delegation is not the same as total surrender. Research by Owens and colleagues found that people will pay a measurable premium to keep control of an outcome, even when handing it off would be the rational move. They called it the ‘control premium’. A fully automated system that does everything in the background sounds great in a pitch but forgets that people don’t want the algorithm in charge of them. Offering override options matters a whole lot even if nobody presses them. The customer is opening the app the way you check that the dishwasher truly ran.