ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of the “pracademic”, followed by a summary of the advertising industry in the Soviet Union. The preliminary considerations are an introduction to the practice of branding at Enefit, the Estonian national power company. Estonia won its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, but inherited an energy industry that was part of the Soviet command economy, and heavily reliant on shale oil. Hando Sutter, CEO of Enefit, has implemented modern branding practices including cross-sector benchmarking. He contends that the energy industry should not think of itself as a “special case”, but compare performance against successful business from other sectors. Two approaches to embedding corporate strategy are discussed: senior-management communication versus the cascade effect, and the former found to be more effective. The transformation of Enefit in recent years to a modern IT driven and green-energy producing company is discussed in the chapter’s conclusion.
