Market Intelligence

Seeing Is Believing: Q1 2017 Consumer Perceptions of Smart Home Cameras

With the close of the first quarter of 2017, we can start culling through all of the consumer reactions to Smart Home devices they have purchased in the last three months. One market segment that is always of interest is Security Cameras. The Nest Cam and Arlo are flagship products in this category that still contains a dizzying array of brands and packages, ranging from ten camera bundles sold at Costco to individual cameras flying off the shelves at Best Buy and Walmart. The question is, post purchase, which brands are delighting consumers by delivering on the promised experience?

Top Ten Most Mentioned Smart Home Camera Firms In Q1 2017

As you can see from the graph above, Nest and Netgear dominate the category. While we see demand for Nest Cam lower than the full portfolio of Netgear branded cameras, overall, Nest customers are happier with their user experience. You can see the cloud of other brands clustered in the area of lower demand and more frustrated users. Within this crowd, we see Logitech and Samsung making gains both in demand (Buzz is a proxy for demand) and Net Promoter Score. So what is the difference between Nest and Netgear for consumers? Some would argue that since Netgear makes most of the WiFi routers used to connect to these cameras, Netgear Cameras should be some of the easiest to set up, given that the initial connection to the WiFi router is a constant frustration for DIY consumers.

Comparison of consumer perceptions of Installation and Setup for Nest and Netgear Smart Home Security Cameras.

You can see from the Experience Funnels above (Red bars show what percentage of the reviews were negative, green indicates the percentage that were positive and grey is neutral) that Nest consumers mention the router set up more than software or any initial wiring. Overall the Nest Cam installation is a net positive experience. The same is true for Netgear. Since Netgear produces a range of cameras that compete both with the high end Nest Cam and lower end multi-camera bundles of Swann and others, you see Netgear consumers discussing Wiring and Software ahead of Initial Router Connection. While Netgear attracts more negative comments for their overall Installation experience, they receive a proportional increase in positive comments as well. In fact the Net Sentiment of Installation for Nest and Netgear is the same, about 13%, meaning that consumers for both brands found the overall experience of Installation to be positive, a key factor in driving Smart Home adoption.

Interestingly, Netgear’s prowess in WiFi did not translate into a significant differentiator for Smart Home Camera Installation compared to the other market leader, Nest. In a future post, we might dig deeper and do a direct comparison between Nest Cam and Netgear’s Arlo for a product level analysis.

If you can’t wait for the next post, check out our analytics platform, the Argus Analzyer, where you can dig deep into the bones of the user experience across the entire Smart Home market. You can also sign up for our free Smart Home market trend tracker, which includes basic access to the Analyzer and email updates whenever something causes the Smart Home market conversation in social media to jump.

What do consumers really ask Alexa and Google Home? Is it all Smart Home?

Whenever I speak about the transformative nature of voice interfaces for society’s favorite multi-user environment, the home, the question that comes up most of the time is how are consumers using products like Alexa or Google Home? Well, as it stands, we have that data… We’ve pulled the consumer reviews on both Amazon Echo and Google Home (the flagship products for both Amazon and Google) to see what usage scenarios consumers speak the most about. Different from survey analysis, where you present consumers a list of uses and they mark the ones they have every considered, analysis of the review comments pull out what is top of mind for consumers. When authoring reviews, consumers mention what is most important to them, not what is most important to the survey designer. This results in a prioritized list of what consumers consider to be most critical to their user experience. And guess what? It’s not Smart Home, per se.

Comparing the most mentioned usage scenarios for Google Home and Amazon Echo (Alexa). Notice that Smart Home uses are not as important as music to consumers.

The chart above shows how often a use case is mentioned and the perception (negative, positive and neutral) of consumers discussing this use case. The X-Axis shows the percentage of all the reviews from 1 Nov 2016 to 31 Mar 2017 that mention a particular topic. You can see at the top of both products that Entertainment is mentioned by over 40% of all voice assistant users. After Listening to Music, the breadth of usage drops significantly with Weather in 3rd place for both. This is where the consumers diverge a bit. Alexa users mentioned catching up on News and Sports more than Google Home users. In fact, Google Home users prioritize Light/Fan Control (the first Smart Home use mentioned) above News and Sports. Light/Fan Control is actually the most mentioned Smart Home use for both ecosystems, a shift from the dominance of Thermostats/Climate control we saw in 2015. Google Home, with it’s Nest integration sees more use of Climate Control than Echo but both have Home Security above topics like controlling movie watching or Reading Books (Alexa allows you to listen to your Audible purchases through Echo and Dot, something about 3% of users are delighted by.

Great, but what does this mean for the theory that Voice Assistants are the killer gateway drug for Smart Home Adoption?

It helps but it is not yet the killer ‘app.’ When less than 10% even mention a Smart Home use for their voice assistant, we have a long way to go before there is a one to one relationship between Voice Assistant adoption and Smart Home bliss. It is important to note that these Voice Assistants are being used to curate audio environments first with lighting, climate and security falling below music, news and sports. Still, as consumers start to ask more of these assistants, it is logical to assume that any new Smart Home experience must tie into these ecosystems, within reason. You don’t want a would be thief yelling through your door, “Alexa, ask ADT to turn off the security system and unlock the doors.”

If you’d like to have more information like this at your fingertips, check out our Message Fit and Product Fit tools here. We’ve made our most basic Smart Home tools available for free so you can see what is driving the overall narrative and experience what life is like with a bit of Argus Insights sprinkled throughout your workflows.

In a future post, we’ll spend time looking at Siri and Apple Home’s position in this ecosystem as well as the recently announced Bixby from Samsung.

With that, “Alexa, Post Blog..”

What does the potential end of Net Neutrality mean for IoT?

Within the whirlwind of changes brought by the peaceful transfer of leadership the United States experience on 20 January 2017, are a shift in the perspectives and policies of the FCC. As this recent article in Forbes points out, it is no longer a question of IF the Net Neutrality rules of 2015 will be rolled back but of WHEN and HOW MUCH? While this has streaming services like Netflix and Hulu shaking in their gross margin boots and explains the investment of ISPs in content over the last few years, this also has an impact of other Over The Top (OTT) services like Facebook, Twitter, Skype, SnapChat, Apple Messages and others. Not only could ISP’s back charge these providers for preferred access on their networks but could also start to share those ‘costs’ with consumers, bundling favored SnapChat access into family plans the way we used to buy SMS messages in bulk.

And OTT service running over these networks that hasn’t yet seem to bubble up to the top rank angst over binge watching the latest season of Iron Fist on Netflix is the Internet of Things, or as I like to refer to it, the Internets of Things. ISP’s, loosed from the equal access/equal performance requirements of Net Neutrality can now price and provision premium IoT services, reducing latency, guaranteeing uptimes and other aspects critical to the deployment of IoT endpoints and their web of connections back to the home office. While this is very good for the firms seeking to deploy IoT solutions this could also turn into a boon for ISPs fighting the slow spiral of dumb data pipe-ness.

There is balance to be struck here. IoT promises to be the biggest economic disruption we’ve seen since the iPhone was launched a decade ago. While there are significant economic rents to be collected, if ISP’s set their premium access pricing for IoT deployments too high, it will delay the recognition of that hoped for revenue and slow the grow of the IoT market significantly. Firms seeking to embrace the promise of IoT are already complaining about the cost per endpoint for connectivity. Imagine the temptation to raise that price as we shift to a non-neutral internet.

Granted, the opposite could also be true for savvy ISP’s. Imagine a carrier bundling lower cost access for IoT deployments based on the lifting of the rules, sharing access across the billions of endpoints required to realize the promise of IoT and enabling tiers of service and performance so that IoT applications that are more tolerance of high latency, lossy data, etc. can realize the benefits of a sliced access internet. A connected pacemaker has more stringent latency requirements than a lawn sprinkler, why charge the same for access?

Top Smart Thermostat Brands Based on Consumer Perceptions

Out of over 1000 new reviews of Smart Thermostats authored by consumers in the month of January, we see that Nest is maintaining their leadership over the other brands within the market, both in terms of consumer demand and perception of the products as measured by Net Promoter score. The buzz level is down almost 50% from December when consumers, giddy with their holiday gifts, shared their views of their newly intelligent comfort control in greater numbers than we are seeing in January. Ecobee provides the biggest competitive threat to Nest in terms of both consumer perception of the overall experience and the consumer demand. Schneider Electric, though a smaller player, performs well against Honeywell from a Net Promoter score, indicating though the Wiser Air Thermostat may not have as large as an install base, those consumers that find their way into Schneider’s ecosystem are happier overall than Honeywell at this stage.

Consumers have a better chance of getting a product they won’t feel like ripping off the wall in a few weeks if they select any of these based, based on the verdict handed down by the court of public opinion. Our next post will explore some of the features of these products such as ease of installation.

Get your own access to the latest Smart Home consumer insights by subscribing to the Argus Analyzer platform. A Product Fit Insights plan includes all consumer reviews across the Smart Home ecosystem for the last quarter, including data like you see above. Check out how you can let the Argus Analyzer do the heavy lifting of collecting, analyzing and summarizing that is happening with you and the competition!

External Amplification, Earning the Attention of Your Market

In our last post you heard more about the evils of Corporate Bias and how our metrics help identify and then mitigate the risk of being a LOUD brand through Social Narcissism. In this post we will shift from an inner focus on how much brands and their advocates reference themselves to an external focus on how the brand content resonates with the market. External Amplification is a metric of how much your content is being shared outside of your brand advocates and employees. Because we track the brand advocates for a given brand, we can determine which of the retweets and other forms of amplification are from the those external to the brand.

For example, if a brand like Cisco tweeted out an announcement regarding a new strategy targeting Autonomous Vehicles, naturally several brand advocates would echo this message out to their networks. In this example, let’s say this tweet attracts 125 retweets by Cisco employees and other advocates we’ve identified as being part of their “Circle of Trust.” At first glance, this looks like a great result. Issue is that the total retweets of this announcement is only 130, which means that while the ratio of tweet to retweet looks awesome(130:1), the actual ratio is 5:1, meaning that only 5 people/accounts outside of your existing advocates found your content to be compelling enough to retweet. Typically we average this metric across all mentions authored by a brand for a given time period to understand, in general, if their message is being picked up and shared out beyond their ‘Circle of Trust.’

Again, pulling data from the Network Function Virtualization market, we see some real results to analyze together:

Brand	Mentions	Corporate Bias	External Retweets	External Amplification
Brocade	16	93.80%	15	0.938
HPE	23	60.90%	21	0.913
Cisco	15	53.30%	27	1.8
Juniper	23	17.40%	14	0.609

Notice that our Corporate Bias culprit, Juniper, also has the worst External Amplification. So not only are they behaving as a LOUD brand, just crowing their own name, but they are also crowing a message that is being amplified at almost half the rate of the competition in this market.

That is another important feature of this metric. This is based on amplification WITHIN the target market. Having people/accounts outside of your market amplify your message is interesting but not useful in advancing your dominance. Knowing that the cousins of all of your employees are helping broadcast your message to their neighbors does not help you grow your awareness within the target market Network Function Virtualization. That is why we pull all these metrics from conversations related to your market instead of your brand. This let’s you see the growing influence your content is gaining for you within the market and, at times more importantly, against your competition.

In the example above, HPE might have a lower Corporate Bias than Brocade, but their content is performing almost as well. Cisco is the only brand with an External Amplification greater than one, showing a multiplying effect of their NFV content, especially relative to their chief competitors. You would only know this if you had the entire market conversation captured, not just the branded ones. You can see how External Amplification is an actionable metric, you can immediately see how your content is resonating relative to the competition, tracking the impact of your campaigns on growing awareness outside of your advocates in real time. This helps you bypass being LOUD and go straight to being effective.

This is what we do at Argus Insights, we focus on metrics that matter, metrics that help our clients move markets. External Amplification is just one of many metrics we have developed to help our clients craft the right actions to drive growth and engagement. let us know if you’d like to learn more! You can also sign up for our free market analysis newsletter.

«‹ 4 5 6 7 ›»