Household Energy Consumption: Understanding the Impact of Income, Racial Diversity and Pro-Environmental Behaviors

The energy sector is an important marketing system and consumer service. The energy sector enables the manufacturing of goods and the provision of services; and the consumption of energy involves multiple entities including firms, consumers, and even government institutions. Our research focuses on an area important to marketers and the energy sectors, that of household energy consumption. Specifically, we use an interactive approach that integrates demographic and situational variables to better understand household energy consumption To address our research questions, we develop a dataset compiled from several publicly available sources, appending zip code level electricity usage data with zip code tabulation area data on household income, dwelling characteristics, and racial diversity. Results indicate that diversity attenuates the direct effect of income on electricity usage. Our study provides an illustrative example of how firms could use multiple sources of publicly available data to garner insight for strategic discussions and to better understand individual energy consumption.