WestLight Energy: The Right Input at the Right Time

Pennisula Clean Energy to WestLight Energy

How naming research gathered from stakeholders, customers, and partners before and after naming built momentum for a rebrand that ultimately needed the community’s approval.

After a decade earning its community’s trust and saving customers hundreds of millions of dollars, a leading California clean-energy agency needed a name for its next decade. But this was no ordinary rename. As a public, community-controlled agency, it would ultimately need the community’s approval to adopt one, a far higher bar than most companies face, and the kind of decision that can stall when boards, staff, and partners aren’t aligned. The way through: the right input, gathered at the right moments.

Momentum, built on the right input

Rather than test a name in isolation, Lexicon gathered input from stakeholders at the two moments that mattered most: before naming, to set direction and build internal conviction, and afterward, to prove the leading name with the community that would have to embrace it. Each step added evidence, and momentum.

• Frame  —  Before naming began, we gathered input from more than seventy people closest to the agency: its staff and board of directors, its community advisory committee, and its community-based organization partners. Together they defined who the brand should become: more creative, energetic, and forward-looking, while staying warm and community rooted. That shared ambition set the creative brief, and early buy-in.
• Explore  —  With a shortlist in hand, we took the candidates to focus groups in select communities, in more than one language, with locally engaged residents. These are the people who would become the brand’s first customers, advocates, and everyday ambassadors. Their reactions showed which name carried genuine local meaning.
• Validate  —  Finally, we confirmed the leading name at scale through a representative survey of 500 residents across the full service area, so the recommendation rested on evidence, not opinion.

The outcome

The result was WestLight Energy, a name that is clearer, easier to say, and unmistakably its own. Because so many voices had shaped and pressure-tested it along the way, the name arrived with momentum already behind it and cleared its community-approval milestone. The new name launched in July 2026 to more than 300,000 households and businesses.