Faculty of Computer Science and Management Ph.D. Dissertation Social Media Management for Consumer Awareness and Acceptance of Smart Meters Yash Chawla Supervisor: dr hab. inż. Grzegorz Chodak, prof. PWr Auxillary Supervisor: dr Kamila Ludwikowska Wrocław, 2020 2 You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?” GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Nobel Laureate in Literature 4 Abstract Innovations are entering the market so rapidly that managing these innovations and ensuring that consumers are aware of its full potential, is a huge challenge. Energy markets, around the world, have been experiencing significant changes and an influx of innovative technologies, such as Electricity Smart Meters (SM), which are an inte- gral element of Smart Grids (SG). This study explores the consumer willingness and acceptance of SM, their preferred communication channels and recommends a social media management plan that would be effective for enhancing diffusion of SM. Results derived through an empirical survey among social media users, in four countries, show that there is still a lack of knowledge about SM among consumers and more marketing communications are required to facilitate the acceptance of SM. Social media can play a major role in these marketing communications and its effective strategy has also been discussed with empirical evidences and experiments in real business environment. This work was partially supported by the following two projects funded by the National Science Center (NCN, Poland) Logistics, trade and consumer decisions in the age of the Internet • (Grant no. 2018/29/B/HS4/02857; PI: Prof. David Ramsey) Segmentation of electrical energy consumers using the stage-change model: • Analysis of factors enhancing adoption of demand side management tools (Grant no. 2016/23/B/HS4/00650; PI: Prof. Anna Kowalska-Pyzalska) 6 Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Motivation . .3 1.2 Aims and research objectives . .4 1.3 Methodology . .5 2 Innovation and Marketing 7 3 Summary of results and core articles 9 3.1 Consumers and Smart Meters . .9 3.1.1 RO1. Consumers’ awareness and willingness regarding SM . 10 3.1.2 RO2. Sources of Information and Communication Channels . 13 3.1.3 Publication Details (Papers 1-4) . 14 3.2 Social Media Effectiveness and Management . 15 3.2.1 RO3. Effectiveness of different content types on social media . 16 3.2.2 RO4. Social Media Management for SM . 17 3.2.3 Publication Details (Papers 5-7) . 19 3.3 Auxiliary results . 20 4 Conclusions 23 Acknowledgements 25 Bibliography 27 Appendix A: Papers 1-7 33 Appendix B: Co-authorship declarations 193 1 2 CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation The 21st century has been deemed as the new age of innovation, where sustainability is one of the key issues that are to be addressed. Innovations are entering into the market so rapidly that managing these innovations and ensuring that consumers are aware of its full potential is a huge challenge. One of the key issues, for managing innovation, is the innovation itself and the concurrence between technical and social elements of innovation (Xu et al., 2007). The social elements or social acceptance is a very important determinant for the smooth diffusion of any innovation in the market (Gouws and Van Rheede van Oudtshoorn, 2011). There are several models which study the diffusion of innovation, from which Roger’s model for innovation diffusion is one of the most widely used (Rogers, 2003). This model puts particular emphasis on communication channels, which are used to market the innovations to the consumers. Different users have different preferences of communication channels, even more so in this age of advanced information technology and the internet (Danaher and Rossiter, 2011). The sector of information technology, highly driven by innovation, has directly or indirectly influenced all walks of life (Ma et al., 2014). The beginning of the 21st century has seen an exponential growth in the number of internet users, with the current global user base of over 4.5 billion. Businesses have adopted new business models that allow them to utilize the opportunities that the internet has to offer (Wielki, 2010). Evolution of social media, with this huge penetration of internet services, has given the general population and businesses, an effective and cheap tool to communicate worldwide. As of 2020, the global number of social media users stand at over 3.8 billion (Kemp, 2020). Social media has been widely used for businesses to market their products and services to the consumers globally and is highly important from the aspect of direct marketing in today’s digital economy (Unold, 2003). Social media is very effective in generating personalized social influence, which enhances the effect of information diffusion and raising public awareness (Booth and Matic, 2011). In some sectors, such as e-commerce, the use of social media is quite high, whereas, in sectors, such as ’energy markets’, there is still scope for large improvement (Accenture, 2015). Energy markets, around the world, have been experiencing significant changes and an influx of innovative technologies, such as Electricity Smart Meters (SM), which are an integral element of Smart Grids (SG) (Verbong et al., 2013; Faruqui and Sergici, 2010). Soon, electricity will become a technology that is tangible and would require 3 4 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION the attention and decision-making from consumers (Kowalski and Matusiak, 2019). In 2009, the Electricity Directive of the European Commission 2009/72/EC, stated that all EU Member States should roll out SM to at least 80% of consumers by 2020. One of major motives behind this was to draw consumer engagement in the energy markets and was subject to the cost benefit analysis. Consumers active engagement in the energy markets, through SM, would provide a demand side response to bal- ance the grids and can help save energy (Soroczynski´ and Szkutnik, 2015). Usage of SM would also provide additional facilities to consumers, such as switching between suppliers, resulting in a more competitive market and lower tariffs (British Infrastruc- ture Group of Parliamentarians, 2018), and can also be looked at as a step closer to consumers gaining more control of their energy consumption (Kowalska-Pyzalska and Byrka, 2019; Weron et al., 2018). However, a number of researchers have expressed concerns regarding the low level of knowledge and engagement towards SM, such as new solutions in the energy markets (Claudy et al., 2010; Verbong et al., 2013; van der Werff and Steg, 2016; Ellabban and Abu-Rub, 2016). Raising the knowledge or aware- ness regarding SM would lead to higher acceptance and engagement among consumers (Kowalska-Pyzalska and Byrka, 2019). There have been several studies in the literature that have analyzed consumer aware- ness and acceptance of SM (as discussed in detail in Chawla and Kowalska-Pyzalska (2019); Chawla et al. (2019b,c, 2020)), but there is a gap in the literature when it comes to studies being conducted among social media users. Social media has been proven to be effective for raising awareness of consumers and also for generating so- cial influence that increases the acceptance of innovation (Booth and Matic, 2011). Moreover, social media users have been found to be early adopters of technology and possess the power to influence the early majority (Droge et al., 2010; Lipschultz, 2017; Khamis et al., 2017). Hence, studying the factors affecting the awareness, acceptance and preferences of social media users, regarding SM, would provide insights to energy companies on how to manage their social media accounts and enhance the diffusion of SM. A combination of all these factors motivated us to study social media management for consumer awareness and acceptance of smart meters. The remainder of the thesis is structured as follows. In Sections 1.2 & 1.3, of Chap- ter 1, the aims, objectives and methodology are discussed briefly. Thereafter, in Chap- ter 2, the objectives of this thesis are discussed with regard to the two sub-disciplines of management sciences, innovation management and marketing. In Chapter 3, the detailed results, with regard to each objective and the corresponding publications, are described. In Chapter 4, the summary of main results and the drawn conclusions are presented. Finally, the Appendices that follow the Bibliography include the 7 papers constituting the thesis and scanned co-authorship declarations for these papers. 1.2 Aims and research objectives The main aim of this thesis is to highlight the factors for social media management, which can enhance consumer awareness and acceptance of smart meters. To cater to this aim, the following objectives have been set. These objects are interesting from the point of view of basic research, as well as for their managerial or practical implications. RO1: To investigate the attitudes, preferences and fears, regarding aware- • ness, willingness and acceptance of SM, among social media users. 1.3. METHODOLOGY 5 RO2: To explore the various sources of information regarding electricity in • general and SM in particular. RO3: To test the effectiveness of different types of content on social media • and device metrics, through which managers can interpret the results of their campaigns. RO4: To create a social media management plan that would be useful for • energy companies to enhance the diffusion of SM. The first objective particularly concentrates on class of audiences that have pre- viously not been studied in the literature, being the social media users. There are several studies in the literature regarding consumer willingness and acceptance of SM (see e.g. Krishnamurti et al., 2012; Ellabban and Abu-Rub, 2016; Chou and Yutami, 2014; Rocha, 2016), but none of which have been conducted among social media users. There were similar studies conducted among social media users in other sectors, such as acceptance of renewable energy (see e.g.