And they're having a blast doing it. It's the most exciting. There has been a blizzard of advertising on television, radio and buses, in newspapers and in the mailboxes of electricity consumers who are being weaned from lifelong dependency on the local utility monopoly. In the Philadelphia area, the electric companies' challenge is to sign up as many as possible of the 78,000 local customers who have been selected to participate in a pilot program that will lead to universal competition for all customers. The companies have until Friday to woo them.
Some lessons are practical.
And some lessons are harder to quantify. Their universal goal is, they say, to build it. Essentially that means that they want consumers to know the company name and to associate some kind of emotional or character attribute with it. But you can paint the van white. Market research told Conectiv that people associate trucks and vans with utility companies.