The Smart Home Sounds Cool, But Consumers Ain’t Buyin’ It

Note: This article was originally published on the CivicScience blog on July 29, 2015. 

Following the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in January, we did a write-up in February on the profiles of consumers based on their potential interest in various categories of home automation products that can be controlled via smart phone apps. At the time, consumer interest in buying any of these types of products wasn’t overwhelming, so we wanted to wait six months to see if that would steadily pick up given all the headlines and buzz.

Unfortunately, when re-checking the consumer pulse in July, we don’t find that much has changed. While yes, over 40% of U.S. adults express they’d consider purchasing some product in this category in the future, interest levels have stalled instead of gaining momentum post-CES.

We found that early product adopters are somewhat more interested – but not as much as we expected.

So what can marketers and category/product managers learn from this? The top-line data compared across time is one thing, but given the unique capabilities of our InsightStore™ platform, our subscribers can mine for important attributes about likely customers that may prove valuable to improving go-to-market strategies.

For example: ‘smart’ audio products are much more likely to be favored by the frequent movie goer — which may signal that there’s marketing opportunity to be had through in-theater advertising.

Getting to these harder-to-find insights through our platform is something our clients can use to gain an edge in the market.

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