The Communicators: Why Communication Matters to the Energy Transition

Across the energy transition, everyone is competing to be understood.

Customers are deciding where to spend. Employees are deciding where to work. Investors are deciding where to put their capital. And communities are trying to understand what a changing energy system will mean for them.

At the same time, technologies are advancing, markets are shifting and big questions about cost, reliability, infrastructure and climate are playing out in public. The challenge is that clear answers increasingly have to compete with confident claims, conflicting narratives and plenty of noise.

That makes the communications challenge hard to ignore. In September, Carbon Brief published a factcheck examining 45 claims made by Reform UK’s leadership about climate and energy that it assessed as false or misleading, covering everything from climate science and net zero to energy bills, oil and gas, adaptation and clean energy.

The individual claims vary, but together they show just how broad the debate has become. Questions about the cost and reliability of renewables, the causes of high energy bills and the economic impact of net zero are no longer confined to policy papers or industry conferences; they are part of the everyday conversation about the energy transition.  

And complex evidence increasingly competes with simple, repeatable narratives, while audiences are expected to decide what - and who - they trust.

What people hear matters. It shapes what they understand, what they trust and, ultimately, what they are prepared to support.

That idea sits at the heart of our new agency film, The Communicators.

Communication shapes change

The energy transition is asking people to understand changes to how energy is generated, transported, stored, bought and used. Many of those changes involve unfamiliar technologies, complex economics and decisions whose consequences stretch decades into the future.

That creates fertile ground for confusion.  

A technically accurate explanation can take paragraphs; a misleading claim can travel in a sentence.

For organisations working across the transition, communicating well therefore requires more than broadcasting positive messages. It means understanding the wider conversation, recognising the claims and concerns shaping audience perceptions, interrogating the evidence and explaining complex ideas clearly enough to be understood without stripping away the context that makes them true.

That thinking runs through The Communicators. The film follows our team as they listen, research, question and develop stories, showing some of the work that sits behind the communications people eventually see.

An evolution for Wildtribe

The film also marks the next stage in Wildtribe’s own development.

We have spent years working with organisations across renewable energy and cleantech, and our role has broadened as the sector and our clients have evolved. The communications challenges we now work on increasingly span reputation, growth, organisational change and market positioning, requiring a more connected approach across brand, marketing, PR and internal communications.

That is reflected in our new positioning: Strategic Communications for the Energy Transition.

We help organisations align their strategy, culture, people and market position as they grow, evolve and navigate change, creating greater clarity around who they are, where they are going and why it matters.

The Communicators is our way of showing some of the thinking and people behind that work, and the role we believe strong communications can play as the energy transition continues to develop.

Watch here

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