Q&A with B2B Research Project finalist, Relish Research in partnership with EDF Energy
Editor’s note: Relish Research in partnership with EDF Energy, are finalists of the 2025 B2B Research Project award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 19 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
EDF Energy partnered with Relish Research to develop a customer-driven, personalized service offering to improve relationships with future and current customers and drive growth. A project that earned the partnering companies a finalist position in the 2025 B2B Research Project Award, part of the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards.
The project resulted in the creation of an actionable and targetable segmentation solution. This approach overcame common segmentation challenges by building personas from both attitudinal drivers and internal CRM variables, resulting in 76% allocation accuracy.
In just one year of use, the solution has informed strategic selling points, operational strategies, new proposition development, Pay Per Click (PPC) targeting, creative development and personalized e-mail communications.
Simon Thompson, managing director at Relish, and Shannon Collins, marketing at EDF Energy described the project in further detail. Learn more in this Q&A with Thompson and Collins
Describe your project and the effect it had on your business.
The project has had a large impact on the way the small to medium sized enterprise within EDF runs day-to-day. The research outputs were designed to deliver against short, day-to-day objectives, as well as having long-term strategic value.
The segmentation and personas have been totally embedded and have transformed how the team think about customers and overall strategy. It’s been able to inform proposition and product offering, and day-to-day customer service and operations.
Specifically, it has informed the development of overall messaging strategy. The operational strategy, has been used to refine PPC campaign targeting and creative development for acquisition audiences and deliver personalized e-mail communications based on individual needs and preferences.
What does it mean to your team to be named a finalist in the 2025 Quirk’s Awards?
For Relish it is particularly special to be a finalist for this award as it really highlights the great outcomes that can be achieved via the deep partnerships we have with our clients, especially with an organization that we’ve worked with in-depth for more than 15 years.
We’re incredibly proud of all the work we do, but it is especially meaningful to be recognized for work that represents client and agency collaboration, showing that the power of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Mostly, we’re proud of being able to work with EDF, a business that is willing to invest in strategic thinking and listening to their customers’ needs, getting real ROI as a result.
For EDF, we are all about being customer centric and believe in the benefits of this project, enabling our marketing to speak to our customers directly on issues that they truly care about. Being a finalist just highlights that we put the customer at the heart of everything we do.
How was the research shared with key stakeholders across the company/marketing team?
Relish produced visual pen portraits to help bring the personas to life, demonstrating their own unique needs, and communicating the strategic direction required for each persona.
Perhaps more importantly, by tying the segments back into the customer database, the research provided a lasting legacy. Meaning it is not only shared across the business but consistently used across cross-functional teams to prioritize workstreams and guide key decision-making.