The Brand Index: How Friðrik Larsen Made Positioning Measurable

That's what they told Friðrik Larsen when he showed up to write his PhD — and he's spent the twenty years since proving them wrong.

Friðrik Larsen moved from Iceland to Birmingham to do one thing: write a doctorate on energy branding. On day one, one of his supervisors welcomed him to the program and told him he couldn't write about it. Why not? Because you cannot brand a commodity. It isn't possible.

He pushed back — what about Perrier? what about bottled water? — and eventually threatened to take his research somewhere else. She gave in. That was the first pushback he got, and in a sense it's the same pushback he's been answering ever since.

Two decades later, Friðrik is a professor, the founder of Brand Index, and the man behind Charge — the only event in the world dedicated to energy branding. I sat down with him for Clean Currents, and the conversation turned out to be less about marketing than about a harder question: why does an industry this important remain so bad at explaining itself?

The unlikely path

Friðrik grew up in Selfoss, a town of five thousand people in Iceland. There weren't many role models around, but a few relatives had done business degrees, so he decided he'd become a banker. Not a calling — just the way people decide things when the menu is short.

A running scholarship took him to the United States, where the first-year curriculum forced him into subjects he had no interest in. Psychology was one of them. He was, in his own telling, a young man who knew it all and was there to study finance. Psychology resonated anyway.

He finished both. And when it came time for the PhD, he refused to choose between them. Merging psychology and finance gives you branding. Narrowing that to commodity industries gives you the hardest version of the problem, because when price is the only differentiator, differentiation is the whole game. Narrowing it once more — to energy, because he's Icelandic and energy is what Iceland is — gave him a field of exactly one.

Which turns out to be a strategy. Do something narrow enough and people notice.

Making the case in a room full of engineers

Anyone who has done communications in this sector knows the feeling of walking into a room where you're visibly the only person without a technical degree. Friðrik describes it well: you can almost hear the room asking what this guy is doing here.

His read on it is generous, and I think correct. Engineers put their guard up early, but they aren't hostile — they're waiting for you to justify yourself. Give them the reasoning, explain why communicating effectively matters not just to customers but to the whole value chain, to employees, to boards, to governments, and they come with you. Once they understand it, they're all in.

The harder room is the boardroom. Brand gets treated as a cost centre rather than an investment, and Friðrik is refreshingly honest that our own profession helped put it there. Communicators have spent too long focused on campaigns and advertising and not enough on strategy. We walk into the C-suite with awareness studies and NPS scores — a legacy metric that works fine for what it was designed for, and was never designed for brands — and then act surprised when we aren't invited back.

His diagnosis is blunt: you have to go in with a number the CFO actually understands. Otherwise you don't get access to the room.

Why he built the index

That's the gap Brand Index was built to close. While collecting data for his PhD across five European countries, Friðrik interviewed CEOs, CMOs, heads of strategy and design. Smart people, good people — using the wrong tools to measure their brands.

So he went looking for the cornerstone. Positioning: how your brand is perceived in the customer's mind relative to the competition. He and his students spent years identifying the variables that drive it, and built an instrument that takes under four minutes to complete but still gives a confident reading. It measures positioning against three dependent variables — loyalty, willingness to recommend, and trust.

Then comes the part that gets a finance graduate's attention: brands that move those numbers are more profitable. As he puts it, you can't do good if you aren't profitable, because you're out of the game.

He's candid about the limits, too. You will never prove beyond doubt that a dollar of brand spend returns $1.30. There are too many variables — wars, energy crises, elections. But you have to try. If you don't, we stay stuck with exactly what we've been doing for decades.

The line that stuck with me came from a prestigious CEO he worked with, a man who hates market research. Except this kind. Because he can use it.

The dilution problem

There's a finding in Friðrik's book on sustainability and energy branding that surprised him more than it surprised me. He interviewed senior executives at some of Europe's largest utilities expecting a diversity of views on branding. He found the opposite. They got it. They understood why you invest in it. Many of them did invest in it.

And somehow it still gets diluted on the way down. It passes through the layers of an organization and by the time it reaches the people who have to execute, the why has evaporated. You're spending a million on this and a million on that and nobody quite remembers what it was for.

He points to Vattenfall as a counterexample — a company where it runs from the CEO down, and which put out genuinely provocative advertising last year. Not remarkable as ads. Remarkable as risk. He's frank that you would never see a North American utility do it. Easier to hide behind the regulator and make money in peace.

Fingrid, the Finnish grid operator, is the other case he raises. A state-owned monopoly with no customers to compete for, which decided to think of itself as a brand anyway. People asked why they'd bother. The answer showed up in how much easier it became to deal with farmers and landowners. Which is the whole point: this isn't only for companies fighting over clients. It's for organizations that have to interact with human beings.

What this means for nuclear

I asked him about nuclear specifically — a sector carrying more inherited emotional baggage than almost any other. His answer was four words long: perception beats reality, every single time.

The perception of nuclear is awful, and it's easy to understand why. It's also brutally hard to fight something that lives in people's minds. You can sell someone a soda pop. Changing an ideology is a different exercise entirely.

His prescription isn't complicated, which is exactly what makes it hard. The industry has to come together and decide, as a body, what it wants to say — and then say it consistently, over and over, until it maybe gets through. Simplify to amplify. Find what resonates, and repeat it well past the point where you're bored of it.

He also offered a warning worth pinning up. The pendulum swings. Data centres were a saviour three or four years ago; the swing has already come. Nobody knows what any of this looks like in three years. And energy companies aren't evil, whatever their critics say — they just don't communicate well, aren't proactive, and don't understand what communication can do for them.

The realist's case

What I appreciated most is that Friðrik refuses the easy optimism this industry runs on. Asked whether the AI and energy security anxieties of the next decade make the clean energy story easier to tell, he wouldn't take the win. Three years ago he'd have answered differently. The honest answer now is that he doesn't know.

Because we don't quite live in an echo chamber — but we do talk to people who think like us, and most people don't. People say they care. When it comes time to back it with a wallet, most won't. They're confused, and they want to do good, and they can't reliably read a nutrition label, let alone parse what "renewable" means. If we conveniently overlook that confusion and assume everyone is like us, we fail.

That isn't defeatism. It's the most useful thing anyone in this sector can hear. He's not giving up. He's fighting the good fight — he just isn't pretending it's an easy one.

On Charge

I attended Charge for the first time this year and had the privilege of judging one of the awards. I came back to my team with a notepad full of things I wanted to steal.

What Friðrik describes as the event's evolution rings true: it started as an argument for why energy companies should brand at all, and has become a working session on how. But the real value is the room. Marketers inside energy companies are often isolated, their voices unheard internally. At Charge they meet a hundred and fifty people just like them, and they learn as much from each other as they do from the stage.

A decade of Charge Awards has surfaced one consistent pattern among the winners, and it isn't clever creative. They're authentic and they're transparent. That's it. Understand your segments, be clear about what you're doing and why, and let people see you doing your best.

It's the sort of advice that sounds obvious until you count how many organizations in this industry actually manage it.

Listen to the full conversation on Clean Currents. You can find Friðrik on LinkedIn, and learn more about his work through Brand Index and Charge.

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