Brands Must Alleviate Concerns around Technology in the Home to Win Consumer Trust

The smart home was intended to make consumers’ lives easier, safer, and more enriching but despite substantial hype and industry investment, smart home technology is yet to be fully adopted by consumers. To design the smart home solutions that customers really want, brands need to shift from a product-focused approach to a human-centric approach.

This is according to Accenture’s The Dock whose report “Putting the Human First in the Future Home” combines detailed global qualitative research with quantitative research to look at consumers’ behaviours and routines and how the influence of emerging technology impacts their identity and motivations—and crucially, the tensions that arise.

The Future Home is an Attitude—not a Technology

Home life is becoming more important for consumers: half of those surveyed (50 per cent) now spend more time in their homes compared with five years ago while just one in eight (13 per cent) say they spend less time in their homes now.

Claire Carroll, Portfolio Director at Accenture’s The Dock, said “The future home should be built around people first. There is a significant opportunity to develop strong future home offerings that are built to last and there are several untapped markets. But success requires brands to think differently about product design, customer segmenting, and targeting.”

The opportunity is here and now

As future homeowners and potential smart-home customers, younger generations are crucial markets. Conversely, many brand’s understanding of this group’s anxieties around technology is limited. Meanwhile those aged 65 and over emerge as an avenue for opportunity.

The youngest respondents are the most negative about the way technology is affecting their lives. Almost half (49 per cent) of 18 to 34-year olds worry that they are too dependent on technology, while 43 per cent of respondents in this age group are also fearful that smart devices in their homes know too much about them. Rationalizing the fears of the 18-34 consumer will be vital to the product design strategy of the future.

By contrast, the group most positive and trusting of technology are those aged 65 years and over – precisely the part of the market that many technology companies have been neglecting. This group see smart devices as making life easier (62 per cent), more fun (51 per cent) and keeping them connected (51 per cent). Their fears around the isolating effects of technology are lower than any other age group (53 per cent) and just 31 per cent of this sector perceive technology as making them lazy. Only a quarter (25 per cent) of the respondents in this group are worried about the addictive nature of technology, the lowest across all age groups.

Claire continued, “Consumers need to rationalize the tensions created by their relationship with technology, especially around dependency, intrusiveness, and isolation. While many brands can sell smart-home products that make people feel more connected, those brands that will deliver real value in the future home are the ones that produce connected products, which also allay their customers’ concerns about feeling isolated in the modern technological environment.

With Emerging Tech come emerging tensions

The research also identified several tension polarities around technology in the home, the strongest being that smart devices make us feel more connected but also more isolated.

Across geographies and demographic groups, the trade-off between “easy” and “lazy” is consistently won by “easy.” More than 70 per cent of people recognize that technology at home makes life easier, from preparing food and ordering groceries online, to controlling their home climate and environment. However, for nearly half of respondents (43 per cent), technology at home can also make them lazy, as there is an overwhelming number of things that can be done without leaving the comfort of the sofa.

Consumers are more likely to agree with positive statements about technology – over seven in ten (71 per cent) agree that it makes their lives easier and almost six in ten (57 per cent) agree that it makes them more connected and makes their home life more fun. However, almost half of global consumers feel technology can be intrusive (46 per cent). Half of the respondents agree that it can be a barrier to social interaction (50 per cent) and this view is most prevalent in Europe (62 per cent), the US (66 per cent) and Australia (65 per cent) – in contrast, just 14 per cent of Japanese consumers agree with this.

Claire concluded, “There is no single technological solution to the future home – but to design smart home products that will have longevity, companies need to better understand what’s happening in the black box of their customers’ behaviour in the home. This means understanding customer attitudes throughout their various life stages, what the idea of home actually means to them and getting a better appreciation of their surprising behaviour behind the front door.”

With people spending more time at home than ever before, brands need to act now to better understand the opportunities. The multi-disciplinary team at Accenture’s The Dock, working with Accenture Research and Fjord analysed the insights to develop eight mindsets that help explain behaviour in the future home. The full report can be read here.