Do collective energy switching campaigns engage vulnerable households? Evidence from The Big Switch

Any initiative to mobilize consumers faces three consecutive hurdles: reaching consumers, engaging consumers and making consumers act. In this paper, we analyse how well the largest collective switching mechanism in UK, The Big Switch, managed with the first two hurdles in Great Britain (GB) in 2012 to mobilize vulnerable consumers. We use zero-inflated count data models to distinguish the awareness process (the first hurdle) from the engagement process (the second hurdle). We find that none of the vulnerability dimensions as defined by the UK regulator impacts negatively on awareness. On the contrary, rural areas and those belonging to the lowest income quartile are significantly more aware of The Big Switch initiative. But when households are required to act on the information, we find that rural areas and those with a larger percentage of senior population are more active. There are two types of extremely disengaged households -meaning that they are less aware and, conditional on awareness, register less: households with children and highly deprived ones. Our analysis reveals that the effect of vulnerability on engagement is cumulative and that special emphasis should be placed on these two types of households when fighting energy poverty using collective switching initiatives.