Adopting New Technology for Building Systems: The Road to the Top

Our client, a leader in the emerging home automation industry in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom.

Our client needed a baseline measurement for awareness of, attitudes about, usage of, and satisfaction with their brand and competitors’ brands of home automation systems. This baseline measurement of industry participants is a standard against which future waves of the study will be compared to evaluate market change and emerging trends.

An online survey was conducted with architects, homebuilders, security installers, HVAC professionals, electricians and custom home automation integrators. All participants must have installed residential thermostats, smoke/carbon monoxide alarms and/or home WiFi cameras in the past 12 months. The U.S. sample was drawn from the client’s in-house list, subscribers to The NEWS, SNIPS, SDM Magazine, and CE Pro publications, as well as members of the myCLEARopinion panel. Clear Seas Research worked with a trusted sample partner for respondents in the U.K.

The research was designed to:

• Understand industry awareness and usage of our client’s and competitive home automation products.
• Measure customer loyalty for our client’s branded products.
• Understand the potential for cross-selling of our client’s home automation products.
• Identify the most used information sources by industry professionals for marketing planning.

The research helped our client understand that awareness and trial are vital to growing the market for home automation. Programs to educate professionals about the benefits and easy installation of home automation will be their most important marketing efforts at this time.

• For programmable thermostats in the U.S., aided awareness is high, but usage is low, due to lack of familiarity and high price. Awareness of other products in our client’s line is low, which leads to a very low probability of cross-selling.

• Likelihood to recommend our client’s programmable thermostat to other professionals is high among those who have installed it in the last 12 months.
• In the U.K., awareness of all product categories was very low. Nonetheless, among those who are aware of the products, a competitor’s brand garnered the most awareness. Again, unfamiliarity and high perceived price are the reasons for lack of trial among those who are aware of the brand.
• As in the U.S., among U.K. professionals who have used our client’s products, likelihood to recommend our client’s products to other professionals is high.

As penetration of home automation increases in both markets, the baseline metrics will be useful in measuring changes in awareness and attitudes, as well as ensuring that professional installers have high satisfaction and loyalty to the products.