Vattenfall Continues Transition From Fossil Fuels With Visual Rebranding
Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
Swedish power company Vattenfall announced this week that it plans to match its goals of transitioning away from fossil fuels with a visual rebranding, changing its logo in an effort to demonstrate its “determination to make it possible for everyone to live fossil-free within one generation.”
One of Europe’s largest producers and retailers of heat and electricity, Vattenfall was obviously once heavily reliant upon fossil fuel sources. But of late, the company has scaled down its scale of business and similarly dramatically scaled down its fossil fuel generation, relying more and more on hydro and nuclear power generation, with a slowly burgeoning wind capacity.
Since 2010, the company has slowly been redirecting its focus, divesting its much of its operations in Belgium, Germany, Finland, Poland, and Denmark. Similarly, in 2016 Vattenfall announced that it would divest all of its lignite coal operations in Germany, as part of a larger trend in its business towards a fossil-free future. At the same time, the company began investing more heavily in the wind energy sector, specifically offshore wind projects such as the 407 megawatt (MW) Horns Reve offshore wind farm, the 600 MW Kriegers Flak offshore wind farm, and the important European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre.
In line with the company’s transition towards a low-carbon future, and as part of the larger global trend towards low-carbon energy generation, Vattenfall announced this week that it was changing its logo, “demonstrating the determination to make it possible for everyone to live fossil-free within one generation.” Vattenfall will also overhaul the entire brand by bringing the company’s 25 other brands under the one name.
“As a leading company, we want to project ourselves in a modern and clear way and build on our strengths,” said Karin Lepasoon, Head of Communications at Vattenfall. “That’s what our customers and the world around us expect of us. “By becoming clearer, we expect to make a greater impact and thus use each krona spent on marketing more effectively in future. Another element in this streamlining process is that we are also reducing the number of our brands, currently as many as 25, and will now replace them with one single updated Vattenfall brand.”
Vattenfall has had the same logo since 1992, and through that time, the company has undergone some radical changes. The company recently conducted market surveys of more than 3,000 people in Sweden, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, which revealed Vattenfall’s logo failed to differentiate the company from that of its competitors. A shift in colors, photos, as well as sound and music in videos, represent a larger shift to the company’s branding.
“We saw that our competitors and the energy market as a whole conveyed more or less the same message and looked quite similar,” explained Lepasoon. “The feeling evoked by our new image now reflects what differentiates us and what we really are: a competent and focused company which contributes to change on a much larger scale through a broader perspective. That is also what people like about Vattenfall.”
The move also follows moves in the past few years of other energy companies similarly looking to set themselves apart from the pack and convey their commitment to a future free of fossil fuels. The most prominent such decision is probably the long-term policies of DONG Energy to divest its fossil fuel holdings and transition to offshore wind, and the October 2017 decision to rename itself Ørsted. However, more recently, Norwegian multinational oil and gas company Statoil announced that it would be changing its name to Equinor.
Chip in a few dollars a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to accelerate the cleantech revolution!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
