——A perfect brand, why is it still far from users?
The State Grid brand has virtually no weaknesses when it comes to data.
China's 500 most valuable brands, with a total value of 7152.58 billion yuan, ranked first for the tenth consecutive year. The Global Top 50 Utility Brands, ranked first for the eighth consecutive year, with a brand strength rating of AAA+. Brand Finance's Global 500 Most Valuable Brands, with a value of $86.3 billion, entered the global top 10 for the first time. The central enterprise brand construction benchmark ranked first with a perfect score.
If brands could be evaluated with scores, State Grid would be the student who not only scores 100 but also completes the extra-credit questions.
But the problem lies precisely here.
When a brand achieves a perfect score in the evaluation system, what kind of relationship does it have with ordinary users? Can this relationship be fully explained by the figure of "brand value of 71.528 billion yuan"?
I'm definitely not here to praise Guowei today, as there are already plenty of people doing that. Nor am I here to deny its achievements, which are undeniably solid. I just want to do one thing: put a perfect-score brand like Guowei to the test in terms of "user relationships" and see if there are any cracks.
The answer is yes. And this fissure is precisely the result of its greatest achievements and greatest limitations, which have occurred simultaneously.
How 'Full' is the State Grid Brand?
The slogan "You use electricity, I use my heart" was formally established in 2011, standing out from 18,230 candidate works and replacing the previous internal staff-oriented "Strive to exceed, pursue excellence".
This change was revolutionary at the time.
A slogan change from "How about us" to "You and me" indicates that State Grid has made genuine efforts in its branding.
But the slogan is only the surface. What truly underpins it is a comprehensive brand management system.
It has become a truly global brand in the international market with 25 overseas social media accounts, 2 million overseas fans, and 450 overseas public welfare projects, making "State Grid" a household name. The Brazilian Beautiful Mountain UHV project has become a textbook example of "grid connectivity and people-to-people connectivity".
From strategy to system, to matrix, to internationalization, the brand development of State Grid is unparalleled in the global utility industry. However, it is this "unparalleled fullness" that makes the following question particularly striking.
What Separates Perfect-Scoring Brands from Their Users
"Using electricity with heart." Everyone has seen and heard it, but if you ask an ordinary user: what is the State Grid exactly to you?
Last summer, a region in Henan experienced a prolonged heatwave. A transformer in an old residential complex caught fire at 8 pm, leaving hundreds of households without power. Repair personnel arrived at the scene 40 minutes later and restored power by 1 am. The next day, someone posted in the community group, "You arrived quickly enough, but couldn't you have replaced the transformer beforehand?"
In terms of service efficiency, State Grid has achieved the ultimate. Arriving within 40 minutes and restoring power within five hours on an extremely hot summer night is a remarkable feat. However, users do not see it that way. They think: why wait until it's burned out before coming to replace it?
This is where the crack lies.
The State Grid brand has been extremely successful in terms of organizational management, but in terms of user relationships, it has never accomplished one thing: making the name "State Grid" become a "person that can be talked to" in the minds of users.
Users' feelings towards it are not affection, but dependence. Not intimacy, but habit. It's not "I feel like someone is putting their heart into it when I use electricity," but rather "I'm using my electricity, just don't have any problems with it."
This relationship is essentially a form of "system dependence" rather than a "brand relationship".
System dependence refers to a situation where you can't do without something, but you're not excited about it either. It's like air, tap water, or the electrical grid at home. You're aware of its existence, you can't live without it, but you won't share your electricity bill on social media or develop emotional affection for it just because it's working smoothly.
This is not a problem unique to State Grid. All infrastructure-based brands face this dilemma, but for State Grid, the issue is magnified by its "perfect score".
Because the better, more comprehensive, and more ubiquitous a brand is, the more it resembles a system. And the more perfect the system, the harder it is for people to establish an emotional connection with it. You can like a person, but it's hard to like a system.
"You use electricity, I use my heart." From a branding standpoint, these six characters make an excellent slogan. It has symmetry, it has warmth, and it puts the service attitude front and center. But from a user-perception perspective, it faces one obstacle that's hard to overcome: users can't feel that "I."
Who am I?
Is it the 95598 customer service representative? The repair team master? The State Grid Corporation of China on the electricity bill? Or the "electricity iron army" who always wears work clothes, always wears a safety helmet, and always appears in the news?
Where Did This Crack Come From?
It's not that State Grid is not making an effort, as it is more diligent than most central enterprises. This rift is the result of a combination of three factors.
The first is the natural abstraction of the brand entity.
State Grid Corporation of China, a gigantic central enterprise managing 26 provincial power companies nationwide, serves 1.1 billion people, with its brand reaching into hundreds of millions of moments of electricity use, yet its brand entity is a massive, faceless organization.
User interactions almost all take place at "touchpoints". Payment is through the APP, repairs are through 95598, and power outage notifications are via text message. Behind these touchpoints are individual people, but they are invisible to users. What users see is always the unified name of "State Grid".
A unified name brings unified trust, but it also dissolves individual character. When all services are grouped under a single name, that name must take responsibility for all the good and all the bad. It has no separate identity, no personality, and no distinct entity that can be liked or disliked independently.
The second is the infinite liability of brand commitment.
"'You use electricity, I use my heart' is a promise of unlimited liability. It has no boundaries. It implies 'as long as you are using electricity, I am using my heart.' But in reality, no one, no organization, can truly achieve 'always using their heart' in every moment and space."
"You use electricity, I use my heart" is a highly idealistic slogan. But idealistic slogans carry an inherent risk: they raise user expectations to a level that reality cannot fully deliver. The more you say "I use my heart," the more users will feel doubled disappointment in those moments when you clearly didn't.
This is why the satisfaction rate of 95598 can be close to 100%, but on social media, once there are power outages, electricity bill disputes, or service disputes, negative emotions can be extremely intense. Because of that slogan, "using heart" has become something that users think "you should" do. If you do it, it's what you should do; if you don't, it's a dereliction of duty.
The third is that the sub-brand matrix lacks "personality growth".
Activities are a brand's "actions", while personality is a brand's "character". When a brand takes action, users will nod in approval; when a brand has character, users will remember and cherish it.
"Electric Bee" has done a lot: going into communities, running science education programs, and providing convenience services. But ask any Wuxi resident, "Who is Electric Bee?" and most will still draw a blank. It has no describable personality, no story that can be retold, no image that invites people to approach it on their own.
They are like a batch of meticulously designed mascots, but without temper, preferences, mistakes, or lovely moments. For a brand to have personality, it must have "lived". It needs to have memorable moments, and even reasons for people to forgive its small mistakes. The sub-brands of State Grid are all too "correct", to the point where no one remembers them.
So State Grid's brand matrix is a "management matrix," not a "relationship matrix." It can classify services with precision, but it cannot allocate emotional connections with specificity.
It doesn't lack scores, it lacks warmth.
It is evident that the State Grid's brand is a typical example of a "strong organizational brand, weak personal brand". The strength of its brand comes from the ultimate output of its organizational capabilities: unified strategy, unified standards, unified image, and unified assessment. In these aspects, it has achieved the first place among central enterprises and the first place among global utilities.
However, its brand warmth, which comes from the meticulous operation of user relationships, is about making users feel that "this person is really putting in effort" at a specific moment, and it has not yet achieved this.
It cannot be blamed for this. Because it is too vast—so vast that any attempt at personification is diluted by the solemn weight of the name "State Grid." Because its service is too fundamental—so fundamental that users only think of it the moment the power goes out. Because its commitment is too complete—so complete that all its good work is taken for granted.
But these "becauses" are precisely the real proposition for its next phase of brand building.
It’s not “how to be fuller,” but “how to be closer.”
Specifically, there are three directions.
Third, give sub-brands room to be imperfect. Let them have their own personalities, their own stories, even their own flaws. A brand that has never made a mistake is impossible to like.
These three points do not involve strategic adjustments, nor do they involve organizational changes, but rather one thing: transforming the brand from a "management object" to a "relationship carrier".
The next step for a perfect brand is not to score 101, but to make the person it has served for ten years occasionally think: this company seems to be truly putting its heart into it when paying their electricity bill.
This is more difficult than topping the brand rankings.