We’ve just had a letter from our electricity supplier telling us how we could have saved money by signing up to a fixed-price deal or paying by monthly direct debit. It’s very kind of them to go to the trouble of doing this, though there is, of course, a suspicion at the back of my mind, that the letter isn’t really for our benefit.
A thought crosses my mind at this point. If they send one letter a year to their 33 million customers (I take this figure from Eon’s Wikipedia entry) and if each letter costs 50p (for ease of calculation) that costs £16.5 million. Sounds like a lot of money. They could do a lot with that money.
But…
From 2006-10 their sponsorship of the FA Cup (including the Women’s and Youth Cups) cost them £40 million. They spent money on other sports-related sponsorship too, but that’s the only one that has a figure attached on Wiki.
The question is, did this make them any money? I don’t know about you but “What sports do they sponsor?” isn’t top of my list when selecting an energy supplier.
Similarly, they spent around £28 million on supporting the Museum next to their corporate HQ over the years 1998 – 2014.
Again, it wouldn’t really influence me in my choice of supplier. I might feel good about indirectly supporting a museum, but it would come a long way after price and green credentials.
It may be that sponsorship pays its way. It may be that sponsorship is just a massive vanity project.
The only thing I do know for sure is that if they sent out one less letter per customer per year they could probably pay for all the sponsorship, and save 8,715 trees a year.
Woodland – Rufford Park
(I calculated the tree usage from this website).