Product Management

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..”

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!

Product Managers Are Falling Victim to An Expert Game of Telephone

Remember the old party game, Telephone? The group sits in a circle and someone starts with a phrase and the fun is to see how much the phrase changes from it’s original version as it make its way around the circle. Great icebreaker but a terrible affliction for Product Managers. Think about, Product Managers are charged with the very soul of a company, the relationship between their product/service and the end customer. They are the fighter pilots of the enterprise, targeting markets, fending off competition, and last line of defense between corporate strategy and market reality. So why are there so many layers of obfuscation between the Product Managers and their target market? The diagram below introduces the Product Manager Web, a representation of the different sources of market intelligence that PM’s have to wade through on a regular basis to fight their way to actually having an impact on customers.

First off, the organic resources that have direct contact with your customers all bring their own agendas to the insights they share. It’s not a bad thing but PM’s need to understand the inherent bias these other stakeholders bring to their efforts to impact the market. Sales teams are famous for asking for additional features to be added based on their last client conversation, buoyed by the belief that, if they just had twice the speed at half the price, the sales team would meet their quota in the next 15 minutes. Outbound marketing and the agencies that support them are notorious for being unable to measure the half of their marketing that works, reporting on metrics like buzz and visits, always requesting more resources to boost these easy to capture but hard to use metrics. Internal market research teams with their surveys and focus groups are essential to get answers to specific questions but can often be used to reinforce outdated perceptions of the market. Ask anyone at Nokia after the iPhone was launched for war stories that will make you weep… Customer service organizations, inorganic (outsourced) as often as they are organic, excel at uncovering problems to fix. With a focus on reducing cost of engagement, there is little time or attention put to moving consumers from satisfied to delighted. All of these methods focus on current customers and prospects and find little to peek behind the curtain of the competitors and their customers. This gap is partially filled by consulting firms like Gartner and IHS iSupply which provide generic research that ensures everyone has the same data about everyone else, not necessarily a source of competitive advantage…

Product Managers hungry for direct contact with their market have few options, costly customer visits, endless hours trolling through reviews and twitter posts. Each of these methods drain resources of time and money from the PM’s efforts to defend their firms from the constant onslaught of competitors. We have been focused on this issue for a quite some time at Argus Insights and will be sharing much of what we have learned in future posts.

Ring a ding ding: Ring Continues to Dominate A Slowing Doorbell Camera Market

The numbers are in. Ring continues to dominate the DIY Smart Doorbell Camera market with respect to consumer acceptance. Fully shedding the grumpy Doorbot customers, consumers rewarded Ring with a Net Promoter Score of over 40%, while their nearest competitors all have negative NPS numbers, meaning that detractors outnumber promoters for Skybell, August, ZModo and Aeon Labs.

One concerning trend is that it seems that consumer interest in Doorbell Cameras seems to be dropping. All brands not Ring have significantly slid in NPS, indicating that consumers are frustrated by their experience with their new devices. Earlier in the year, we thought that 2016 would be the year of Doorbell Cameras but it seems that demand is eroding in the second half of the year. It is also likely that Doorbell Cameras provided by service providers like Vivint are also seeing increased demand, buoyed by Ring’s massive spend on advertising.

If you’d like to dig deeper, check out our new Argus Analyzer product, where insights like this are at your fingertips, with the the first platform for Product Managers to gain direct access consumer inputs so critical to the success of their products and services. Priced so even Startups can afford it, there is no excuse for Product Managers to be surprised by their competition or their consumers again.