CES 2018 is a wrap. Right now everyone is returning to their normal days, nursing whatever bug they picked up from a week of frantic hand shaking across the petri dish of CES. Not only was I able to walk the show floor but we also collected every tweet and instagram post on the show. While in past years I have renamed CES as the Car Electronics Show with the heavy emphasis on Connect Car and Autonomous Vehicles, this year was dominated by Smart Home and Robotics.
Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence Were Sprinkled Throughout All CES 2018 Social Mentions
Automotive, typically a dominant force for CES interest, fell to fifth place, even with BMW’s autonomous drift racing experience at the convention center. nVidia shifted away from a pure Automotive focus and showed off efforts in their core gaming as well as their continued leadership in Artificial Intelligence, keeping them in the top 10 most discussed brands in the show.
Virtual reality beat out Televisions and Gaming though LG’s forest of curved displays was one of the must experience booths on the show floor this year, the battle for VR/AR was more interesting to the world than bigger, curvier, 8K displays. Gaming is typically heavily tied with VR and Televisions and this year was no different with Gaming related announcements in displays, Gaming focused VR headsets and more. Drones and Smartphones rounded out the bottom of the segments that grabbed the most attention this year at CES.
Missing from list that have dominated years past were Wearables and Tablets. As these markets have matured, in the case of Tablets, and slowed, in the case of Wearables, new announcements are not driving as much attention. In many ways, this year was looking for the heroic story to drive engagement for the entire CE industry. CES is typically a tremendous array of technological “coulds” in which a few golden consumer “shoulds” are found. This year Smart Home attempted to take that prize. I’ll dive deeper on that within another blog post.
If you are interested to see how your market or your brand performed at CES this year (or even compared to last year) Argus Insights has the data. Just contact us at this link and I’d be glad to share what we know about your brands ability to grab mindshare this year from your competition.
While most of us are winding down 2017, getting our last holiday purchases done and looking forward to a few days of family and fun, there is a group of folks that will not get a real break from work until January 14th, when the Consumer Electronics Show finishes and these stalwart people can finally get CES off their brain and to-do lists. As you can see from the chart below, promoting the largest fest of new consumer gadgets has already begun in interest as firms look to position their view of the new to be top of mind as group of people larger than the population of Madison, Wisconsin descend on Las Vegas.
Smart Home Trending Ahead of Automotive and Smart Homes in CES chatter ahead of the holidays
It looks like the Internet of Things is already claiming the top spot in the minds of CES watches. Artificial Intelligence, predictably, touches every segment of CES and will factor heavily in the messaging of new goodies being shown. Robotics is grabbing attention ahead of Smart Home as humanoid robotics and factory automation touch the lives of a growing percentage of the world’s population. Smart Home is occupying the fourth spot, the highest preshow in the years we’ve been tracking CES in social media.
If your brand is looking to make a big splash at the show, nudge mindshare ahead of your competition, let us know. We’ve helped companies like Vivint dominate CES by understanding in real time how their message is resonating with the ENTIRE show and making changes that ensured their dominance in Smart Home. Drop us a note on our Contact Us Page and I promise you’ll be armed with the insights to own your slice of the Consumer Electronics Show.
If you are currently trusting the future of your enterprise to market intelligence gained from polls and surveys, the results of this election should terrify you. Not for the outcome but for the failure of polls to deliver their promised certainty of the outcome. The 2016 election will go down as the day that polls failed us, or at least failed to represent what was actually happening in the population. FiveThirtyEight and the wunderkind Nate Silver, for literally years the most trusted analyst in politics because of his big data approach to predicting outcomes, published this prediction ahead of the polls opening Tuesday: FiveThirtyEight.org’s Prediction of The 2016 Election Outcome as polls opened on Tuesday based on analysis of polls. Remember this is a likelihood measurement, not a guaranteed prediction. The final electoral map from the New York Times showing where key states flipped in directions options of what the polls were indicating. Much of the momentum behind the polling activity missed the actual votes completely.
Now in Nate’s defense, this wasn’t a zero chance of Trump’s win. 538 did suggest that Trump had a 28.6% chance of getting at least the necessary 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency. But what the polls were telling us along with this analysis is that it was unlikely that Trump would win. As it turned out, the polls were not an accurate reflection of the population. Polls have become the buggy whips of Market Intelligence, useful during their time but if you’ve ever tried to whip your Prius to make it go faster, that’s equivalent to using a survey to instrument your market. While this has been spoken of in dark (and light) corners for years, this was a complete breakdown of our ability to instrument populations with any appreciable accuracy. And since many survey companies stake their ability to represent populations based on their success in predicting election outcomes, we have a problem.
We have spent decades trusting our politics, our products, our marketing, our movies, our futures to the results of surveys and polls. Companies and political action committees alike spend billions every year on constant surveys of their target populations of customers/voters. Tuesday’s outcome indicated what a colossal waste of time and money that is. That these methods no longer reflect, with any useful accuracy, what is actually happening in the market place. With all the talk of voter fraud, we should spend more time looking at the fraud perpetuated by polls and surveys. These methods lead to a blindness on the part of the organizations that commission them. Nokia was blinded by their own surveys to the threat of Apple and the iPhone. Axe Body Spray was blind to the misogyny their ad campaigns rained down on half the population when they tried to launch their first odor (scent) for women. And now we have evidence that polls contributed to the blindness the media and the Clinton campaign had to the real strength of Trump’s support.
From the beginning Argus Insights has focused on building metrics based on “Should” rather than “Could.” Heavily influenced by my time at IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, we have always centered on observation over stimulation, listening over asking, because, like Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle (not meth recipe), the very act of taking a poll changes the validity of the answers given to a pollster. We do not prove our performance by showing our ability to predict elections, but showing how our metrics align with consumer acceptance. Companies need to open their eyes to their actual consumers, across the entire market, not just those willing to reflect your opinion foisted on them through constant surveys. Polls have proven to be a waste of resources, both time and money. Now we risk our future if we continue to rely on these inaccurate methods of instrumenting populations. Instrumenting the actions consumers take across the entire market is the key to avoiding brand blindness and it is something we have spent the last seven years perfecting here at Argus Insights. How else have we been able to beat Wall Street analyst estimates of iPhone sales almost every quarter for the last five years? We listen and observe, we don’t poke and frustrate. And as a result, we have a pretty accurate crystal ball.
If you want to join the post poll movement or just ask questions about how we whip up our secret sauce, let me know. Our goal from the beginning has been to put into the hands of decision makers the best evidence for driving innovation and growth. With our new Argus Analyzer toolset, we’ve made taking that first step even easier.
Smart Home has significant growth opportunities in 2016. While consumers are losing interest in Tablets and Laptops, which saw big drops in both buzz and delight from March 2015- March 2016, Smart Home and Wearables are maturing both in user experience and demand. Though Smartphone buzz increased, the market saw growth slow significantly in recent months, with users expressing less satisfaction.
Chart of the Day: Wearables and Smart Home on the path to growth
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Smartphones make everything easier. A smartphone puts all your pictures, music, social media accounts, emails, and even credit cards right in the palm of your hand. With all this convenient digitalization, though, consumers do not discuss “payments” as much as other use cases. Based on over 75,000 smartphone consumer reviews collected from January 2016, consumers mention using a Smartphone for financial transactions in less than one percent of reviews. This small amount of discussion was led by buzz from Samsung Pay featured in Samsung’s newest models.
Chart of the Day: Consumers show limited interest in smartphone transactions, but Samsung Pay is in the lead
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