Why Clean Energy Brands Struggle to Tell Their Brand Story
Your investors want data. Your partners want proof. Your customers want hope. But if your brand is trying to be all three at once, you’re landing as none of them.
If you're building in clean energy or climate tech, your audiences are likely very diverse. You're operating in a space where the people who fund you, those who regulate you, those who install or operate your technology, and those who ultimately benefit from it are four essential and distinct audiences.
The challenge? Each of those has a completely different definition of what "good" looks like.
Take a renewable energy platform as an example. You would be dealing with :
institutional investors or grant bodies who need to trust your financial model and impact metrics;
technical partners, engineers, or operators who need to understand and believe in your product's reliability;
policy makers or regulators who need to see compliance, credibility, and long-term viability;
and the end beneficiaries (whether that's businesses reducing their carbon footprint or communities gaining access to clean power) who simply need to understand what's in it for them.
What these represent: four entirely different communication briefs, sitting inside one single brand.
Audience Dilemma: the easy mistakes
When faced with this complexity, businesses can easily fall into either of two risky solutions:
The flattening approach: making a single, compromise-heavy message that resonates with no one; typically defaulting to technical jargon that impresses engineers but alienating everyone else. Here goes your awareness and conversion potential, badly hindered.
The alienating approach: creating such distinct communications for each audience that the brand starts to feel incoherent and unrecognizable. This makes your business look confusing, unclear, and immature. In a sector where credibility is everything and scepticism runs high, that's a costly signal to send.
The good news is that this tension is solvable. In fact, resolving it is core to your mission. The climate crisis demands urgency and trust. If your brand can't hold space for both the investor scrutiny and the human story, your problem is simply translation-related: something in the execution of your marketing strategy isn't keeping up with your vision.
So what can you do?
Start with these 5 key steps:
1. Do the research
You probably have a working understanding of your audiences already. But even the most obvious assumptions can be misleading, therefore active listening is absolutely key. Make sure to talk to your technical partners, investors, and the businesses or communities you're trying to serve. The insights from those conversations are almost always more specific, and crucially, more revealing, than anything you'd arrive at from the inside.
(The climate tech space is particularly prone to a credibility gap: audiences are increasingly educated about greenwashing, and the bar for what counts as "proof" is rising sharply. What resonated two years ago may no longer be enough.)
2. Map where each audience actually lives
To tell the right story, it’s key to establish (or sharpen) where each audience will encounter it. Are your investors finding you through impact reports and industry conferences? Are technical partners engaging with white papers and product demos? Are potential corporate clients coming through LinkedIn or procurement networks? Are community stakeholders reached through local engagement or press coverage?
Each touchpoint has its own expectations. Make sure to lay these out clearly and incorporate them within your overarching strategy. This will guide what you say, how you say it, and what format it takes.
3. Match the story to the moment
Once you know who you're talking to and where, you can identify which stories will actually land, and when. A detailed breakdown of your carbon sequestration methodology will resonate powerfully with a scientific reviewer or impact investor. That same content will likely mean very little to a facilities manager deciding whether to switch their energy supplier. But both of those people need to feel like your brand was built for them.
4. Think beyond words
Tone of voice matters enormously in this space, but so does everything else. The imagery you choose, the data visualisations you build, the pacing of your brand film: all of it communicates something about who you think your audience is. To caricature, a brand that leans entirely into stark, technical aesthetics when pitching to investors but pivots to abstract nature photography in its consumer-facing content, without a coherent visual thread connecting the two, will feel fractured and untrustworthy.
The goal is a brand that can flex its register: serious and data-driven when it needs to be, human and inspiring when that's what the moment calls for, while always feeling like the same entity.
5. Build flexibility into your brand from day one
This is the one most often left too late in climate tech, where founders are understandably focused on the science and the product rather than the brand architecture. But your visual and verbal identity needs to be structured so it can credibly present impact data to a room of institutional investors and, in the same week, tell a compelling human story to a journalist or a potential corporate partner.
Approach that flexibility as a feature of your brand. It is significantly harder to retrofit than it is to design in from the start (especially when you're scaling fast).
The bottom line
Every climate tech venture is unique, and so are the audiences it needs to bring along with it. There's no one-size-fits-all answer, but there is a consistent principle: the brands that cut through in this space are the ones that take every stakeholder seriously, invest in genuinely understanding them, and build the creative infrastructure to speak to all of them with fluency and conviction.
If you're navigating a brand that needs to speak to multiple worlds at once and are looking to craft compelling stories that attract and convert, we offer a free one-hour strategy consultation. Reach out here.
