Tom and I are doing an MSI Webinar today on Marketing on the IoT. Details: https://cc.readytalk.com/registration/#/?meeting=qqn82k8h2a6n&campaign=38s2o3sykkgi
How to Market the Smart Home: Focus on Experience, Not Use Cases
For smart home adoption to expand beyond the niche segments of technologically sophisticated upscale consumers and technology-focused DIYers, marketers must do a better job of understanding the inherent value the smart home offers. Current marketing approaches are fragmented and focus on individual devices and single use cases. Most companies are wondering which combination of entry points – appliance and home entertainment control, energy management, pet monitoring, property protection, safety and security – make the most sense. But, the mass market is not buying a platform or devices controlled by an algorithm, they are buying an experience. The key to smart home marketing is to view the smart home as a complex dynamic system, an assemblage with new capacities from ongoing interactions among devices and consumers, from which new experiences emerge. Marketers must focus on communicating the value proposition inherent in experience; current approaches may actually be underselling the smart home. We discuss the value of our framework and offer eight actionable insights derived from our research that can guide marketer action in the early stages of adoption and usage of consumer Internet of Things devices that comprise the smart home.
Emergent Experience and the Connected Consumer in the Smart Home Assemblage and the Internet of Things
Download the Monograph: Hoffman and Novak (2015) Emergent Experience in the IoT
Since the commercialization of the Internet began over twenty years ago, we have been fascinated with the opportunities that computer-mediated environments present for human interaction. As a result, we have spent the last few decades researching the marketing and consumer behavior impact of consumers’ interactions in digital environments.
Now, as the consumer Internet of Things emerges, we find ourselves with renewed excitement as we consider the opportunities for consumer interaction in physical environments with objects that have brought the Internet with them into the real world. Just as the Internet was revolutionary because it enabled many-to-many communication through connected digital networks at unprecedented scale, the IoT is a revolutionary advance that brings the digital into the physical realm. Now, interaction is distributed not just virtually “on the Internet,” but also everywhere in the real world where people actually live, work and play.
What awaits us as we are able to interact with smart objects in our everyday lives, and these objects are able to interact with each other, often autonomously? What are the implications for human interaction and for consumer experience? Will new marketing approaches be required? In the course of thinking about these kinds of questions over the past few years, we realized we needed a new framework to help our thinking jell. We found that framework in assemblage theory. The smart home assemblage serves as the context for our theorizing, but we believe our approach generalizes to any consumer IoT assemblage.
In the monograph linked above, we present an assemblage-theory based conceptual framework and its implications for consumer experience in the smart home. In 8 sections, we discuss the evolution of the Internet and the emergence of the consumer IoT, offer a lay version of assemblage theory, develop our framework and discuss the implications of our framework for research in UX, consumer experience, and marketing strategy. The last two sections offer some early practical insights derived from our theory and some perspective on where things might be going.
Because the pace of change is rapid, we wanted to put this material on the Web as early as possible for comment and feedback. The monograph remains a work in progress. We are developing several papers based on these ideas for submission to academic journals and look forward to hearing from others working in this compelling new area.
Donna Hoffman & Tom Novak
Washington, DC
V1.0, August 20, 2015
My First Few Days with the Basis Band
I’ve wanted to get a Basis Band ever since I first saw it at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. Unfortunately, the Basis Band has been pretty much out of stock for the past year and half, and pretty hard to get your hands on. So I was pretty excited when my wife somehow leapfrogged ahead of me in the queue and received an email invite to order a couple of Basis Bands. We went for one in white (her) and one in black (me).
Mine came with a crooked display, however. Might not bother everyone, but I’m a perfectionist and it bothered me. I read the return policy which mentions a 15% restocking fee, but when I emailed Basis they were great. No restocking fee, they immediately shipped out an advanced replacement which I received in a couple days, free shipping and free return. The kind of customer service you…
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HAPIfork of the Future
What’s a HAPIfork? The $100 HAPIfork was announced at CES 2013 and received wide media coverage ranging from Tech Crunch to Consumer Reports to ABC News and beyond. The chunky techno-fork lets you keep track of how many bites you take and how fast you take them, encouraging you to slow down your pace of eating. Why slow down? Andrew Carton, president of Hapi Labs tells us that “eating too fast and insufficient mastication has been tied to all sorts of problems, including acid reflux and weight gain” (PC Magazine).
Technology Laws and Forks. The HAPIfork is at the vanguard of networked utensils 1.0. As we enter the era of the Internet of Things, we can expect devices like the HAPIfork will evolve. But how? Five technology laws give us some clues:
- Moore’s Law – processing power will double every 18-24 months
- Gilder’s Law – communications…
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