In energy, telecommunications, and rail transport, standard consumer panels and syndicated reports cover only a fraction of the picture, while the most important information is scattered across regulatory decisions, tariffs, company reports, and the industry’s tribal knowledge. Researching regulated markets therefore requires a different toolkit than FMCG projects: it begins with mapping formal sources and ends with in-depth conversations with people who understand the mechanics of licenses, tariffs, and reporting obligations.
How does research in regulated markets differ from projects in open sectors?
A regulated sector is one in which access to business activity, prices, service quality, or contractual terms are shaped by an administrative authority – URE in energy, UKE in telecommunications, UTK in rail transport, and ULC in aviation. The methodological implications are significant. First, operational data often constitute commercially sensitive information or are covered by trade secrecy, so they do not appear in open sources. Second, the number of market participants on the supply side may be limited, which makes traditional quantitative research among suppliers difficult and necessitates a qualitative or mixed-methods approach. Third, some information – tariffs, decisions, licenses, and monitoring reports – is public but dispersed and requires systematic desk research with an understanding of the legal context.
Research in regulated markets must also account for information asymmetry between operators and end customers. In the utilities sector, individual consumers rarely understand the structure of their bill, the tariff mechanism, or the difference between a retailer and a distributor. This means that standard questions about “satisfaction with the provider” or “willingness to switch” require prior respondent education during the interview or the use of projective techniques. Telecommunications require a similar approach – breaking down an offer into its components (data transmission, voice, device, value-added services) is not obvious to most respondents and requires moderation.
Regulatory dynamics present an additional challenge. URE decisions on distribution tariffs, successive EU energy packages (such as “Fit for 55”), spectrum auctions in telecommunications, or changes in rail infrastructure access charges can alter the study’s boundary conditions during its implementation. A project planned for six months must allow for updates to the desk research and potentially follow-up questions for expert respondents about recent decisions.
How should research be designed when data are dispersed or confidential?
Regulated market research begins with three parallel workstreams: mapping public sources, identifying industry experts, and designing end-customer research. Each of these workstreams has its own logic and its own pitfalls.
The first workstream is systematic desk research of formal sources. In energy sector research, these include: URE tariff decisions, DSO and TSO reports, PSE balancing reports, ENTSO-E data, financial statements of listed companies, PTPiREE reports, and consultation documents from the Ministry of Climate and Environment. In telecommunications, they include UKE decisions, market status reports, auction documents, and reports from infrastructure operators. In transport, they include UTK decisions, PKP PLK reports, GUS (Statistics Poland) transport data, and CUPT reports. The value of this work lies not merely in collecting documents, but in cross-verifying them – a distribution tariff reveals a cost structure that can be compared with a DSO’s financial statements and the regulator’s report.
The second workstream consists of expert in-depth interviews (IDIs) with people who have operational experience in the sector: former regulator employees, managers at energy trading companies, technical directors, legal advisors specializing in energy or telecommunications law, and brokerage analysts. These respondents are selected purposively rather than representatively, and the value of a single conversation may exceed that of dozens of quantitative surveys. As Hume’s Institute experts point out, in regulated sectors most critical information is not hidden in the sense of being secret, but dispersed across documents and in the minds of several dozen people – the role of a researcher with sector experience is to know where to look and how to interpret what they find. An expert interview in the energy sector differs from an FMCG interview: the discussion guide must include precise terminology (URD, IRiESD, PPA contract, guarantees of origin), otherwise the respondent will consider the interviewer incompetent and limit their answers to generalities.
The third workstream is end-customer research – B2B or B2C. The methods used here are more standard (CATI, CAWI, IDI, FGI), but the research instrument must account for respondents’ limited knowledge of the product. In research among SMEs in the utilities sector, a two-stage technique works well: first, a short diagnostic interview with the person responsible for energy procurement, followed by an in-depth section with a technical representative. In B2B telecommunications customer research, it is crucial to distinguish between the decision-maker and the user – in corporations, these are two different people with different evaluation criteria.
An example of a mixed-methods approach is a segmentation project in the utilities sector, where qualitative exploration among industrial customers (a typology of attitudes toward self-generation, energy storage, and PPAs) precedes quantitative validation on a larger sample, and the findings are calibrated against DSO reporting data and other publicly available operational data. Without the desk research layer, segmentation based solely on declarations would be detached from actual consumption profiles.
What errors most commonly occur in research on regulated sectors?
The first common error is treating customer declarations as a sufficient source of market knowledge. In a sector where customers do not understand the structure of the product, answers to the question of “what determines the choice of an energy supplier” are largely post hoc rationalizations. Without a layer of behavioral data (supplier switches, actual consumption profiles, responses to tariff communications), survey findings lead to incorrect conclusions about motivations.
The second error is ignoring the legal context when designing the research instrument. Asking a business customer about their “willingness to sign a long-term green energy contract” without explaining the difference between a physical PPA, a virtual PPA, and the purchase of guarantees of origin generates responses that are not comparable across respondents. In telecommunications, an analogous problem is asking about “internet quality” without distinguishing technical parameters (bandwidth, latency, jitter, availability).
The third error is underestimating the time needed to recruit experts. In narrow markets (transmission system operators, rail infrastructure managers, large industrial customers), the population of potential respondents consists of several dozen people nationwide, and decision-makers have demanding schedules. Recruitment for qualitative research in such a segment takes weeks, not days, and requires a network of contacts and the methodological credibility of the research team.
The fourth error is confusing the role of the researcher with that of a regulatory advisor. Hume’s Institute conducts research projects – it provides verified data, segmentations, decision maps, and attitude models. Interpretation in terms of regulatory lobbying, tariff price forecasts, or investment recommendations is a separate area of expertise. Blurring these roles diminishes the quality of both layers – the research loses its independence, and the recommendation loses its empirical basis.
The fifth error, particularly evident in international projects, is transferring methodologies from deregulated markets to regulated ones without adaptation. Researching energy consumers in a country with fully liberalized retail markets and capacity market mechanisms differs from research in a country with frozen household tariffs. The same applies to telecommunications – a market with a dominant incumbent operator and a market following full access liberalization have different customer decision-making structures.
When should a mixed-methods approach be used, and when is desk research sufficient?
The choice of project depth depends on the research question and the risk associated with the decision it is intended to inform. The following list outlines typical scenarios in which Hume’s Institute selects different method configurations in regulated sectors:
- Desk research alone is sufficient when the question concerns market structure, market shares, regulatory frameworks, or international comparisons and reliable public sources are available (regulator reports, company reports, public statistics).
- Desk research plus expert interviews works well when interpretation of sector dynamics, identification of technological trends, or a map of regulatory stakeholders is needed. Experts supplement formal data with informal context.
- Mixed-methods (desk research + IDIs + quantitative research) is essential for customer segmentation, satisfaction research, designing new tariff products, or modeling willingness to switch providers. Without a quantitative layer, segment sizes cannot be estimated; without a qualitative layer, the quantitative instrument does not reflect customers’ actual ways of thinking.
- Ethnographic and observational research can be applied in passenger transport (analysis of passenger journeys, touchpoints with the ticketing system, and experiences at transfer hubs) and in prosumer energy (observation of the actual use of PV installations, energy storage systems, and HEMS).
In Hume’s Institute projects, clients from regulated sectors most often underestimate the value of the desk research layer and overestimate the value of a single quantitative study. Well-conducted desk research with cross-verification of regulatory sources answers a significant proportion of business questions before fieldwork begins – and what remains can be researched more precisely, at lower cost, and faster.
Frequently asked questions
What data are available in regulated sectors?
Publicly available data include regulator decisions (URE, UKE, UTK, ULC), tariffs, reports from infrastructure companies, market monitoring reports, consultation documents, and public statistics. In energy, this also includes data from system operators (PSE, DSOs) and European platforms (ENTSO-E, ACER). Commercially sensitive data – bilateral contracts, margins, and detailed cost information – remain outside public access and require expert interviews or customer-side research.
How can a market be researched when data are confidential?
Rather than seeking the figures themselves, the study is designed to reconstruct them indirectly: through cross-analysis of public documents, interviews with former sector employees, independent experts, and capital market analysts. In end-customer research, techniques that reveal behavior (conjoint, MaxDiff, choice-based analyses) are used rather than declarations alone. Source triangulation provides findings sufficient for most business decisions.
Which methods work best in energy and telecommunications?
In energy, an effective approach combines regulatory desk research, IDIs with sector experts, and customer segmentation research (B2B and B2C) with a choice-based conjoint layer for testing tariff offers. In telecommunications, mixed-methods projects combining qualitative exploration of needs with quantitative validation and customer experience analyses across digital touchpoints predominate. In both sectors, the common element is an in-depth understanding of the regulatory framework, without which interpretation of the findings remains superficial.
Ask about a research project in your regulated sector
If you are planning research in energy, telecommunications, transport, or another utilities sector, the Hume’s Institute team will help select methods appropriate to your market’s information constraints. Contact us to discuss the project scope and possible methodological approaches.