Teardown · October 2023 · EV charging infrastructure
Built as a case study exercise using public information. Not a client engagement.
ChargePoint: turning commissioned research into a segment nobody was addressing
The situation
Less than 1% of UK office buildings had EV charging infrastructure. The market research existed. The segment strategy didn't.
ChargePoint had commissioned Mordor Intelligence research on EV charging in European commercial real estate. The exercise was to turn it into audiences, messaging and a campaign, the gap between a research report and something a marketing team can execute.
<1%
UK offices with charging
3
Markets sized
6.8%
UK CAGR
The analysis in three numbers.
What I built
An executive summary of the research, the audiences a CRE-focused campaign should target, segment messaging for whitepapers, advertising and thought leadership, and a campaign outline across audiences, geographies, messaging and channels.
Market sizing for the three priority countries: the UK at $31.4M growing to $46.7M by 2028 at 6.83% CAGR, Germany at $35.5M to $53.4M at 7.05%, France at $8.1M to $11.3M at 5.58%. Each with macro context and the unit economics a building owner actually faces: substation costs, per-charger installation, annual maintenance, and payback range.
The judgment call
Leading with the landlord's arithmetic rather than the emissions argument.
Commercial real estate is not an environmental buyer. It's a yield buyer. Transport being a quarter of UK CO2 emissions is true, motivating for policymakers, and not what gets a charger installed in an office car park.
What gets it installed is tenant demand, competitive differentiation against the building down the road, and a payback period that clears the hurdle rate. So the messaging had to run on installation cost, maintenance cost and ROI range, with sustainability as the reason the tenant demand exists, not as the pitch.
What I'd do differently
This is the weakest of my teardowns and I'd rather say so than pad it. It's competent synthesis of someone else's research, and it doesn't contain an original strategic argument the way the Sumsub or WalletConnect work does. If I rebuilt it I'd interview three property managers first. The whole thing rests on assumptions about landlord decision-making that were never tested against a landlord.