How Choice Became Choreography
There’s a moment when the curtain falls away from complexity, revealing the elegant machinery underneath. It’s part of my daily professional life, and it’s very rewarding to see a “Wizard of Oz”-like revelation, when all elements fall into place and all starts to make sense to everyone involved.
In a personal setting, it recently happened to me, holding two identical documents: pre-sales offers from competing energy suppliers that differed only in logo and color use. Everything else, from layout and typography to phrasing and discount calculations, was mirror-perfect. This couldn’t be coincidence. This seemed choreography.
The Architecture of Illusion
What I had stumbled upon was the energy industry’s most sophisticated achievement: transforming genuine competition into a staged performance.
In the Netherlands, consumers are presented with an array of more than 20 licensed suppliers and dozens of contract options. In early 2024, the ACM granted licenses to nearly 60 parties (although only a fraction actively competes for households), creating what appears to be a vibrant marketplace full of brands promising greener energy, sharper pricing, or better service.
Yet beneath the display lies a different reality. The market is effectively controlled by fewer than ten major players; European giants who manage portfolios of brands like a theatre troupe. My “old” supplier was a subsidiary of a German top-tier operation. My “new” supplier? Another sub-brand of that same supplier. What felt like competition was, in truth, an internal optimisation exercise within corporate structures designed to capture every type of customer.
The Psychology of Manufactured Choice
This isn’t accidental design; it’s behavioural engineering at scale. Energy companies understand what psychologists like Daniel Kahneman observed long ago: faced with too many options, we don’t analyse, we shortcut. Comparison sites step in as trusted guides, but, in reality, they are finely tuned sales funnels. They filter us, route us, and in the end deliver us back into the arms of the same companies we are trying to evaluate. And they often claim independent advice, while also selling their own package deal.
The system works because it rewards our desire to feel clever. Switching suppliers triggers a sense of victory: we’ve beaten the system, shaved hundreds of euros off our annual bill, proved ourselves proactive. But the win is algorithmic. Whether we choose Brand A or Brand B, the parent company still profits.
Economics of Engineered Disloyalty
Here is where the model reveals its true brilliance: it is cheaper to manufacture churn than to reward loyalty. Traditional retention requires genuine value creation: better service, real innovation, meaningful discounts. But switching incentives only requires marketing finesse and data analytics.
The structure is deliberate. New-customer discounts of hundreds of euros are not market anomalies; they are features designed to keep the wheel spinning. Consumers hop between brands owned by the same holding companies, each jump generating data, each jump renewing engagement. Loyalty becomes a liability. The loyal customer pays full price while the restless customer is rewarded for leaving.
A Spreadsheet Revelation
I couldn’t resist diving deeper. I built my own spreadsheet, pulling raw tariffs and terms from official sources instead of relying on aggregation sites. The inconsistencies were immediate: the same tariffs dressed differently, discounts that evaporated in the fine print, comparison tools that obscured rather than clarified.
This is where my background in simplifying complexity became useful. The energy market isn’t difficult because energy itself is complicated. It’s difficult because confusion serves the incumbents. Each new tariff structure, each subsidiary brand, each marketing twist adds another layer of insulation between the consumer and true choice.
Step back, and the picture becomes clear. The Dutch energy market was deregulated to encourage competition and benefit consumers. Instead, it evolved into a finely tuned mechanism for simulation: competition as performance, choice as illusion.
And it isn’t unique. We see similar patterns in telecommunications, insurance, banking; industries where consolidation hides behind a façade of variety, where complexity itself becomes a competitive advantage.
The Parallel Universe of Mobile Carriers
If the energy market’s structure feels like a well-kept secret, the mobile market’s is its more public-facing cousin. The three major network operators in the Netherlands are KPN, VodafoneZiggo, and Odido (formerly T-Mobile). On the surface, they are fierce competitors, each with its own brand identity, advertising campaigns, and flagship stores. But step into a virtual mobile shop, and you’ll quickly see a familiar pattern.
This is where the “aha” moment lies.
Each of these major players operates a suite of sub-brands and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO’s), creating an extensive network of “competition” that is really just an internal battle for market segments.
- KPN, holding a roughly one-third market share, captures budget-conscious consumers through brands like Simyo and Youfone.
- Odido (formerly T-Mobile), the market leader with nearly half of the share, targets different demographics with Ben and Simpel.
- VodafoneZiggo, with around a fifth market share, uses a brand like Hollandsnieuwe to attract specific customer profiles.
These budget brands are not independent; they run on the same physical network as their parent company. The reason they can offer lower prices is that they operate with fewer overhead costs, relying on online-only sales and minimalist service models. This mirrors the energy market perfectly: the loyal customer pays a premium for the full-service brand, while the price-sensitive consumer is siphoned off to a sub-brand for a “deal,” all of which flows back to the same parent corporation.
This strategy is an example of behavioural segmentation. By creating an illusion of choice, these companies can capture both the customer who values premium service and the one who is solely focused on price, without having to engage in a destructive price war between their core brands. It’s the same brilliant, and somewhat cynical, choreography we see in the energy market, proving that when the game is about customer acquisition over loyalty, a company’s best competitor is often itself.
The Crucial Distinction: Loyalty vs. Churn
It should come as no surprise to anyone in marketing that creating brands for different target audiences is a standard playbook. Take the automotive industry, for example. Citroën and Peugeot, once separate manufacturers, merged to form PSA, now part of the massive Stellantis group that also includes Opel, Lancia, Fiat and the luxury brands Maserati and DS. Similarly, the Volkswagen Group operates a portfolio from Volkswagen and Audi, to Skoda and Porsche, and from Seat to Bentley. Each brand serves a distinct segment with its own loyal customer base. The loyalty is preserved, and the parent company benefits from scale.
This is where the parallel breaks down, and the energy market’s true nature is revealed. In the automotive world, the multi-brand strategy is about consolidating legacy brands and optimising economies of scale while maintaining brand loyalty. When you buy an Audi, you are a loyal Audi customer, not a disloyal Volkswagen customer. The brands exist to build and keep customer relationships.
In the energy sector, the brands are not meant to foster loyalty; they are designed to facilitate disloyalty. The complexity is not a byproduct of mergers, but a deliberate feature of the design. The system is engineered to encourage you to leave your current provider for a “better deal” from a brand that is likely owned by the same company. Loyalty, in this model, becomes a liability for the customer, not a virtue to be rewarded by the company. This is the difference between a market that is consolidating and a market that is deliberately complex. It’s the difference between collecting brands and manufacturing churn.
Connecting the Dots
Those identical documents in my hands were not simply evidence of corporate efficiency. They were symbols of how modern markets learn to simulate competition while eliminating its risks. Within the rules, nothing deceptive is happening. Within the system, it is strategic brilliance.
But brilliance does not equal customer satisfaction. What we have is a marketplace optimised for corporate efficiency and consumer engagement: elegant, profitable, but ultimately hollow. A machine designed to extract value from our basic need to feel like we’ve made a good choice.
Recognising the choreography doesn’t mean we have control over it. Once you see the system behind the system, you may feel you’ve been taken for a ride. It’s not about which supplier to choose, but whether we are content with markets that have evolved beyond their original purpose.
Those contracts on my desk reminded me: the market is not broken, it is working exactly as designed. The question is whether we, as consumers, accept that design; or whether we begin to demand something simpler, something more transparent, and something more straightforward.
That moment of déjà vu, staring at two identical contracts, was not simply a revelation. It was rather an invitation to rethink what competition really means, and what customer value should look like in an age of manufactured complexity.
I believe the companies that thrive in the next phase won’t be those perfecting the illusion, but those removing the need for it altogether. Real differentiation, genuine simplicity, authentic value creation; these may be the competitive advantages when the curtain is pulled back.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/energy-markets-beautiful-deception-roland-biemans-4ba6e
PS (2025-09-03): The Ghost in the Machine
And the plot thickens, as they say: I stumbled into yet another layer of the performance. After switching suppliers, I received a call from what introduced itself as “the independent intermediary between energy companies.” A neutral-sounding body, supposedly official, handling all the customer-facing confirmations.
But when I asked who they were and how they obtained my details, the answers grew vague. They insisted they “handled all the data,” as if that were simply a fact of nature, not a process requiring consent. To me, they were an unfamiliar party. Neither my old supplier, nor my new one, nor the comparison site had introduced them. Yet here they were, phoning me with my personal details in hand.
So I did what I often do: I dug. It turns out this so-called intermediary isn’t a regulator, nor an energy supplier, but a private platform company. They present themselves as developers of “neutral tools,” but their real role is “plumbing”. They build the pipes that connect comparison websites, suppliers, and call centres, and their clients — whether big utilities or budget brands — use those pipes to keep the churn machine spinning.
And this explains the choreography:
- Step 1: A major European energy company operates multiple brands and sub-brands in the local market.
- Step 2: These brands feed into “independent” comparison sites, which act less as neutral guides and more as lead generators.
- Step 3: Behind the curtain, a software platform manages the flows, capturing and distributing consumer data.
- Step 4: A call centre enters the scene, contacting you under the guise of official confirmation, closing the loop.
The brilliance lies in the framing. Each player claims independence, yet each is tied into the same ecosystem. The comparison site “helps” you choose. The platform “processes” your data. The call centre “confirms” your switch. But in truth, you’ve never left the system at all.
What struck me most was how invisible this layer is. It’s not the supplier you remember, nor the website you clicked, but a backstage actor you never agreed to meet. Your data becomes their currency, and the more it flows, the more value is extracted.
This is the ghost in the machine: the hidden infrastructure that transforms personal choice into tradable commodity. Your “recht van verzet” remains one of the few instruments of resistance; an opt-out in a marketplace designed around perpetual opt-in.
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