Smart Home – A New Marketing Era

Abstract

A“Hey, Alexa!”, “Ok, Google!” – Commands like these already underline the immense impact of the Smart Home industry on consumers’ minds and business marketing activities. A Smart Home provides several benefits and improvements to the life of consumers – especially from a convenience point of view. In terms of business perspective, Smart Home products including Smart Speakers pose serious challenges for marketers as it is primarily Smart Homes change the entire customer journey. Secondly, Smart Speakers significantly shorten the customer journey. At the same time, together with the rise of Smart Speakers, audio branding and voice profiling have become progressively important. As a result, in order to remain competitive in upcoming eras businesses are forced to reconsider their advertising activities. Smart Speaker providers already integrate ads into music streaming as well as into news sections. Purchasing is aided through socalled proprietary ‘skills’ or ‘actions’. In order to market Smart Home devices more effectively, brands will be dependent on Amazons’ sheer abundancy of products as well as on Google’s advertising power. This article presents an assessment of the positive and negative aspects of the current Smart Home market. Furthermore, information on the development of the Smart Home market and where it is to be located within the marketing mix is provided. Lastly, the paper gives a future outlook of Smart Home development and prospects.