CivicScience Insight Report
Home Automation Products:
Consumers State Preferences and Predictions for Smart Home Offerings
February 17, 2015: CivicScience looks at the hot consumer electronics category of home automation
products for the “smart home” and the types of consumers who are more interested in purchasing:
•
Audio
•
Climate control
•
Electrical outlets/switches
•
Home security
•
Lighting
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Thanks to the immense prevalence of smart phones – our current data (February 2015) puts it at being used by 65% of consumers – the ability to control aspects of a home’s physical operation is only an app away. The category of “home automation” (also called the “smart home”) finds new ways to leverage technology to turn those smart phones and web-enabled devices essentially into remote controls for different wired functions of our residences. Are we ready for this next wave of consumer tech? And if so, which aspects of home automation have bigger appeal to them? It is, after all, a fairly new category on the market – but with no shortage of offerings. Last month’s
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) even saw introductions of products such as self-watering flower pots and automated pet feeders that go behind simple timers.
For this CivicScience Insight Report, we created several syndicated polling questions for our network that focused on five categories of home automation/smart home products and asked consumers to weigh in on:
• Which are they most interested in purchasing?
• Which do they believe will be the most popular in the next year? The five product categories of focus we selected for each question were:
• Audio
• Climate control
• Electrical outlets / switches • Home security
• Lighting
We collected over 2,200 responses from U.S. adults to each question, and using our enterprise consumer research platform the InsightStore™, we were able to find additional market research nuggets beyond core demographics to better understand the types of consumers that gravitate towards one product category over the others – or to none at all.
Here’s what we learned:
Top-Line Analysis of Home Automation Questions
Nearly half (49%) of U.S. adult consumers have interest in purchasing one of these types of products. Of those, home security leads with 50% of interested consumers, very distantly followed by climate control devices (17%).
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While 51% of consumers say they have no interest in any of these products, that doesn’t stop them from predicting which will be most popular. 74% made a prediction, and of those who did predict, home security is the run-away leader here too – capturing 57% of popularity predictions.
The rest of the product rankings by popularity look nearly identical in pattern to purchase interest. This suggests that consumers believe that the products in which they have personal interest are more likely to see success sooner.
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More Likely Consumers for Home Automation Products
Beyond the summary poll data, we used other data we’ve collected about these consumers over time to learn more about the more-likely customer for some smart-home products vs. others.
First, here are some summary points on what we’ve learned before we look at the data by product category: • All of the home automation products are most popular in purchase interest among those who live in the
suburbs vs. urban or rural areas.
• Younger consumers are more likely to be interested in purchasing audio and lighting products. • Older consumers (45+) are less likely to be interested in any of these products, but when they predict
product popularity, they are more likely to say home security tech.
• Lighting automation products are more likely to be attractive for purchase to those who fall in the lowest and highest ends of the income spectrum.
• Tech and electronics trend fans are much more likely to predict that climate control devices will be most popular a year from now.
• Audio product makers may want to strongly consider featuring cats in their ads…
And now a look at some of the data we found when studying each answer’s respondents and where they over-indexed relative to the general population of respondents for these questions:
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Home Security Products:Who is more likely to be interested in
purchasing? 49% of consumers are interested in purchasing these products, and demographically, they look pretty close to general population – except that they do index 28% higher among those 35-44 years old. Those who like to tell others about new technology are also more likely to be interested in home security products.
Who believes this product will be most popular? This is the top choice in every age category, but particularly among those over age 45. It’s also the top pick in every income group. Slightly more women than average vote this way, as do market mavens.
Climate Control Devices:
Who is more likely to be interested in
purchasing? Women are more interested than men (58% vs. 42%) in climate control. Who else? Those in suburbs are 31% more likely than average. Those who believe their personal financial situation will get better in next 6 months are 44% more likely. Those who like to tell others about new
technology.
Who believes this product will be most popular? Those who most closely follow trends and current events in technology and electronics are 123% more likely to vote this way than average. Lighting:
Who is more likely to be interested in
purchasing? Those 18-34 years old are more likely than average. 47% more likely than average to earn under $25K per year in household income and 160% more likely than average to earn $125K-$150K per year. Multi-pet households are 50% more likely to pick this option.
Who believes this product will be most popular? 18-24 year olds were 75% more likely than average to vote this way. Those earning under $25K are more likely than average. 40% more likely to live in the suburbs. Those who like to tell others about new brands or technology.
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Electrical Outlets/Switches:Who is more likely to be interested in
purchasing? Men slightly more than women (53% vs. 47%). Those in suburbs 28% more likely than average. 86% higher than average among those who like to try new products before others. 70% more likely to be dog owners.
Who believes this product will be most popular? Those aged 35-54 lead among consumers choosing this product for popularity. Audio:
Who is more likely to be interested in
purchasing? 18-29 year olds. Those who believe their personal financial situation will get better in next 6 months are 60% more likely. 94% more likely to be cat owners.
Who believes this product will be most popular? 18-24 year olds were 120% more likely than average to vote this way. Those making over $150K are more likely (+100%) than average. 58% more likely to live in the city. Passionate music fans. Those who like to tell others about new brands or technology.
There is significantly more data about these respondents available, but we aimed to present some of the highlights in this report.
What our team believes is interesting is that price points of these products doesn’t seem to correlate to consumer preferences or predictions. Take for example the typical price point of a single Dropcam brand wireless camera ($199.00) and a Sonos PLAYBAR wireless speaker ($699), which carry considerably higher price points compared to products such as a remote-operated dimmer switch ($49.99, as one example) to a remote outlet controller ($69.99). Those more “financially accessible” products are either not equating to a “cool factor,” or consumers don’t yet buy in to their functional benefits. That said, smart audio products are still not yet rising in popularity given the amount of advertising exposure they’ve seen and their time on the market.
CivicScience will continue to monitor these home automation product categories over the course of 2015 to look for changes in consumer preferences and sentiment.
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About the CivicScience Methodology:CivicScience collects real-time consumer research data via polling applications that run on hundreds of U.S. publisher websites, cycling through thousands of active questions on any given day. Respondents are 100% voluntary opt-in with no incentives, compensation or coercion -- they answer just for fun and are kept anonymous, allowing for greatly reduce bias and higher levels of engagement. Respondents for this report were weighted for U.S. census representativeness for gender and age, 18 years and older, and data was collected from January 19, 2015 to February 9, 2015. Using its technology, CivicScience builds deep, timely psychographic profiles of these anonymous respondents with each question they answer over time, providing valuable consumer sentiment and behavior insight data to the decision makers who care. The CivicScience methodology has been scientifically validated by a team of academic leaders and by independent research firms. CivicScience currently has more than 30 million anonymous consumer profiles stored, growing daily.
© February 2015. CivicScience, Inc. http://www.civicscience.com
