The Path of Emergent Experience in the Consumer IoT: From Early Adoption to Radical Changes in Consumers’ Lives

Up to now, IoT device adoption is happening mainly in the niche segments of technologically sophisticated upscale consumers and technology-focused DIYers. To reach a broader range of users, marketers must do a better job of understanding and offering the inherent value of smart products. Current marketing approaches are fragmented and tend to focus on individual products and single use cases. They may actually be underselling the consumer IoT. The mass-market consumer is not buying a platform or devices controlled by an algorithm, they are buying an experience. We need to ask, in what ways consumers and devices will interact with each other to create the experience they actually seek. Therefore, the main challenge is to implement a bottom-up approach that encourages users to experiment with their devices and their interactions and to integrate their individual experiences into everyday routines.

The Complex Network of Things: When Technology is Making the Deal

What consumers notice from the IoT is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the surface, dozens of applications are communicating and interacting with each other. A brand that wants to succeed in this complex environment needs to work within this network and make sure that its messages are the ones that filter all the way through and ultimately reach the consumer. IoT designers need to make sure that products and devices can only send and receive valid messages and consider the ramifications of those messages on the rest of the system. If security is underestimated, the whole system and the consumers are put at risk. Further, it is important to collect and examine the data that the interactions generate to better understand the usage of IoT-enabled products and their interactions with other elements of the complex network.

Connecting the World and Reinventing Customer Centricity

The classical customer journey with its touchpoints is transformed into a lifelong, interactive customer relationship within an IoT-based product-service ecosystem. The customer journey happens in multiple, partially automatic loops that make it significantly less predictable for manufacturers and retailers. For many product categories, the IoT is not going to take off until providers and retailers succeed in getting at what their customers really want. For one thing, they need to better understand individual usage behavior, and for another, there is a need to better personalize products and services, creating emotional and situation-specific customer experiences. Expanding the ability of digital products to communicate with each other, to record and analyze usage behavior and to implement concrete product improvements will be decisive. If customer centricity is reinvented in the IoT space, customers will see a real value and smart products will replace classical products in the next five to ten years.

Internet of Things: How to Avoid Short-Term Errors and Ensure Lasting Adoption

The pressure of delivering products in hyper-competitive markets often leads developers to ignore basic data management precautions, along with a failure to devote adequate resources to marketing. To assure that short-term errors don’t cause long-term damage for the IoT, developers must adopt new strategies. Converging on a single IoT standard could foster adoption as well as better security protocols. To handle the sheer number of connected items and their need for constant interaction demands investments in high-performance networks. For IoT products to integrate deeply into consumers’ daily lives, applications must be integrated into existing solutions from trusted brands. Finally, they must do more than simply replace existing and still-working items, but add new functions and new applications that existing technology can’t possibly duplicate.

Amazing Machines and the Quest for Meaning in Consumption

The benefits brought to us by recent product innovations also come with potential burdens for people who are motivated to consume by identity motives - that is, by the desire to be the kind of person that they want to be. Being freed from a personally relevant routine might be undesirable. Therefore, IoT adoption will be more likely when the associated tasks are less relevant for identity signaling and less likely when the associated tasks are relevant for one’s identity. However, people who oppose IoT application in one context might willingly accept IoT applications in others with less personal relevance. Managers should not overlook that people’s quest for meaning in consumption remains an important driver of buying decisions even in our age of amazing machines. Physical products won’t completely disappear any time soon, especially when they are relevant for a person’s identity.

Connecting Everything With Everything: The Sky is the Limit. Interview with Linden Tibbets, Co-founder and CEO of the services platform IFTTT, San Francisco, CA, USA

IFTTT is a neutral platform that offers easy and free ways to get all your apps and devices talking to each other. Millions of users worldwide have enabled more than 75 million Applets for over 600 services that already cooperate with the platform. Linden Tibbets, co-founder and CEO of IFTTT, explains that everything in the future will be a digital service. Connecting all these services is a tricky task and many companies are struggling with making these connections. Tibbets explains how the IFTTT platform tackles these interfaces and functions and how end users and companies can get more value from being able to connect just about everything with everything.

Internet of Things – Will Humans be Replaced or Augmented?

Augmented Intelligence - effective human-computer symbiosis - has the potential to address emerging challenges successfully, possibly more so than pure AI. It integrates the unique abilities of human beings that cannot be replicated by AI. Large-scale IoT problems often cannot be solved by either computers or human beings alone. Therefore, there are significant opportunities in IoT applications that are coupled with the notion of Augmented Intelligence. Managers need to consider carefully for which task, in which way and to what extent IoT applications will be applied. They must make their choices based on the expected performance, cost and risk of autonomous IoT solutions that would operate without human oversight. For example, automated manufacturing, predictive maintenance and security IoT solutions may be cautiously fully automated. However, human-oriented applications, such as smart retail, could still maintain a certain level of human oversight.

IoT Stories: The Good, the Bad and the Freaky

Consumers’ perceptions of technology are less matters of product attributes and concrete statistical evidence and more of captivating stories and myths. Managers of IoT can instill consumer trust when they tell highly emotional stories about the technologically empowered self, home, family or society. The key benefit of this approach is that storytelling-based IoT marketing allows consumers to forge strong and enduring emotional bonds with IoT and, in many cases, to develop loyalty beyond belief. However, stories aren’t always positive. Negative stories and meanings about a technology that are circulated in popular culture can be dangerous and harmful to a brand or a new technology. Regardless of its source, marketers need to understand the nature of the doppelgänger images that may be circulating for their technologies. They can be regarded as diagnostic tools to better understand how consumers think about and experience their IoT solutions. Also, doppelgänger narratives are valuable raw ingredients from which marketers can cull new, more captivating IoT stories that nurture consumer adoption.

When Brand Familiarity Breeds Risk: The Curse of Negative Knowledge

In today’s world, knowing more about a brand can make people think worse of it. Rather than helping a brand, increased familiarity can actually add risk. This is a phenomenon referred to as “negative knowledge.” It happens when the more consumers know about a brand, the less they like it. Possible reasons can be that consumers feel embarrassed by the brand, that they have bad brand experiences or learn about them in the media or from friends, or that they dislike a company’s business motives. Once consumers know something about a brand, it is hard for them to “un-know” it. During a time of media fragmentation when all managers are struggling to gain more fame for their brands, it’s critical to realize that brand knowledge comes with a potential dark side. While it’s always wise to avoid brand obscurity, marketers must be ever cognizant that what customers know about a brand really can do more harm than good.