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Intelligent energy feedback: Tailoring advice based on consumer values

Panel: 9. Consumption and behaviour

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Caitlin Bent, Energy Saving Trust, United Kingdom
Zoltan Kmetty, Ariosz Ltd., Hungary

Abstract

With the roll-out of smart meters across the EU, there is a growing interest in the use of feedback to change consumer behaviour. Natconsumers is an H2020 funded project developing methods for the provision of tailored energy feedback, based on a combination of smart meter data and user profiling. At the heart of this is a focus on ‘natural language’ – communication which is emotionally intelligent, relevant, and tailored towards consumers’ interests.

Natconsumers is based on the premise that for advice to be effective, it must be personalised (Abrahamse, 2007; Bervoets, 2014). This means that it must be tailored to a household’s and householder’s specific context, to ensure the advice is relevant. It also means that it must be tailored to the individual’s values and motivations. People do not simply act as rational actors, driven by the costs and benefits of their actions; rather, whether people engage with energy saving advice will depend on their motivation to do so (Steg et al. 2015). There are, therefore, two strands to developing tailored advice: what to tell people, and how to say it. In this paper, we will focus on the latter: tailoring the style and framing of feedback based on consumers’ values and motivations.

To do this, we have conducted a survey of 4000 people across Italy, Denmark, Hungary and the UK. Utilising a combination of questions around motivations, attitudes, and values (based on Schwartz, 2003) we revealed a series of primary and secondary values which influence how people think about energy. We have identified 7 consumer segments, each of which must be communicated with in a different way to create advice which will resonate with their interests and world-views. For each segment, advice must be framed differently, playing on different values, to create an intelligent ‘natural language’. This segmentation feeds in to the wider Natconsumers project, developing methodologies for natural language feedback which can be applied across the EU.

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