Analysis of China's Six Smart Home Market Dilemmas

China's smart home companies in the absence of foreign giants, can get out of their own way of innovation? Media based on the market first-line practice, observation and thinking, summed up the smart home six major defeat.

One of the dilemmas: find just need

Many companies began to reflect on their own product strategies after launching smart single products that have suffered from cold markets. So just looking for a horn that just needs to be a hard-frustrated type of company, as if to find a just needed to find a magic weapon, there is no just need is a false demand is nonsense, he is the smart home sector determined to learn a lot.

But is the smart product driven by the need to promote it? As the smartest representative of the smart phone model, was it just needed to promote it? Apple's smart phone to subvert the Nokia's functional machine, because it was discovered just need to just find the just needed The ability has always been the strength of traditional mobile phone manufacturers led by Nokia. However, with the rise of the mobile Internet and the rise of artificial intelligence, they could no longer find the North, and they just needed it, but they no longer responded.

The essence of the smart market is not just a push, but a scenario that redefines the product. All functional smart products that start out just need not grab users' minds. Last year, many companies introduced their own smart light bulbs. They also listed a bunch of functions in the introduction. They hope that one indicator of the probability can touch the user's just needed, and no one will applaud. Just need is the pseudo-demand of intelligent products, and it is also the epitaph of functional products. The intelligence is placed on the spiritual pursuit of human groups. Smart products are designed to create new life scenarios or new lifestyles for users.

The second dilemma: high pricing

Yesterday I just saw a smart light bulb, which is located in the wake of sleep. Of course, many other functions are superimposed on it. The price is over 400. Many other products on the market, such as smart water bottles, are all eye-catching. So they also It is impossible to retain the user's eye.

I once worked with a well-known household electrical appliance company to develop smart water purifiers. They told me that the company stipulated that the market price of smart products must be at least three times higher than the newly added cost, that is, even if the smart products are standard The price of WIFI module is reduced to 20 yuan, and their price will therefore rise above 100 yuan, not to mention the existence of other supporting costs. Traditional companies still want to use intelligent features to increase product selling points to obtain higher premiums. In fact, this is contrary to the essence of smart products. Smart products are designed to realize the privatization of users, show a true closed-loop experience, and tap the user's backward value to form a transfer payment.

Therefore, selling the product as an isolated product and using smart functions to obtain profits will be difficult for at least the smart product field, and users will not pay for it. The cost price is the king, and obtaining the first batch of severely hunger users forms the self-growth of word-of-mouth is the correct path of market evolution. Of course, there is another extreme, which is to reduce the cost and launch low-priced smart products at the expense of the user experience. The cost price is different from the low price, smart products rely on low prices can not open the emerging market, loss of user experience is worth the candle.

Dilemma 3: Make entrance

Starting from smart routers, the entrance to the smart home has not stopped. The router extends to the gateway, and even cameras, TVs, and light bulbs all want to be the hardware entrance to the smart home. None of the results were made. On the contrary, it is necessary to integrate other products to form entrance-level features that hinder the user experience of their own products.

Do not know why the smart hardware to build an entrance, as if the control of the entrance to control the smart home to the "Train, a ring, gold and two thousand," and can live a happy life lying down to earn money. But the entrance was there, silent and uninteresting, and when duang heard it, the smoke screens were all seen as naked swimmers.

In the smart home to create an entrance, or take the road in the past, smart house control, is contrary to the "decentralized, flattened" Internet spirit. The mobile phone as a center is a problem left over from history. Now that we are building an entrance and a center, we take the red flag against the red flag and wear new shoes to restore the old road. It is contrary to the style of the times. Therefore, we should abandon the entrance thinking and make intelligent products that are really high-frequency use. Whoever has the most viscous human-machine interaction is better. Whoever can connect with more intelligent products will form a key node.

Dilemma 4: Learning Millet

I saw many executives in the market who are smart products jumping up and down every exhibition forum, and they have Internet thinking and user experience all day. However, smart homes have not found the true sense of smooth development of the market, apart from letting them fall from an original product manager into an online navy.

In this statement, we must talk about Xiaomi, and we must talk about O2O. Let's take a look at the essence of Xiaomi's model. Millet's real product in the market is its smart phone and mobile power, the former destroyed the domestic cottage mobile phone industry, which destroyed the mobile power industry in Guangdong. After its own smartphone was attacked by domestic manufacturers such as Huawei, Xiaomi's product line continued to evolve, and it wanted to form a barrier through the entire smart home ecosystem. The problem is that after the smart routing and smart bracelet marketing frustration, Xiaomi changed the past price butcher line, smart socket from the market's expected 39 yuan to 79 yuan, smart bulb pricing are also more than one hundred yuan.

Millet's development in smart products in 2014 was not smooth and far from expected. This is why it pushed smart home kits in early 2015 and took a smart home. But is the smart home system a blue ocean?

Xiaomi’s advantage is to use the low-cost organizational and marketing costs brought about by the Internet’s thinking in the existing mature markets with huge volumes, and to use the low prices to plunder existing markets. This can be said to be in the smart phone and mobile power industry, the film is not there. But in the face of a creative future market, the Xiaomi model has been effective, which has been verified in smart routing and smart home packages. This tells us that in the smart home market, which was still a niche for more than 10 years in the face of hardships, Xiaomi was estimated to be “even if the self-employment is not a practice.”

The first of five difficulties: push standard

To build a system standard for smart homes is a traditional system-level smart home business dreaming for many years. However, this has also created the same dream of the entire industry. Since market participants have not been able to form an oligopoly, it is not surprising that the city is constantly changing the king flag.

Are all the world's endangered people, and what is too much to worry about? However, the concept of traditional domestic business is not allowed to do anything in the absence of system planning, self-righteous things. So everyone has basically stopped at the standard so far. As if there were no standards, China's smart home would not have its place. The problem is that the standard is the result of the natural selection of the market. Any artificial formulation and strong push will be voted by the user.

Standards are used to come from love, goods are used to make money. We should weaken the engineering properties of smart homes and strengthen the consumption attributes of smart products. Only real product managers can save the domestic smart home industry, and this is not the standard setter. This is an era of relying on products. This is an era of commercial democracy. This is an era of consumer sovereignty. Therefore, users are faced with product development and product promotion systems rather than system products. From this point of view, during the two sessions, Lei Jun called on the country to formulate national unified standards for the smart home industry, which made one see the paleness and weakness of the millet model and gave up its position as a representative of new productive forces.

Dilemma 6: Light Cloud

Smart home appliances and smart home appliances companies are basically traditional manufacturing industries, and it is difficult to form a profound understanding of the cloud. Even think that the cloud is just used to flick the user and make himself a tall label. As a result, they cannot truly achieve the cost of pricing, the cloudization of services, and the privatization of users. The result is that they disregard the Red Sea, which is selling at a cost price but is constantly facing a price war. They disdain to use the cloud to generate services, so the experience is linearly interrupted, and it cannot be closed-loop and iterative. They disdain for the late participation of users. They just want to conquer users with one-off extreme products. They are constantly developing new users and constantly losing old users.

The essence of smart products is to realize the privatization of users, so as to truly realize the positive accumulation and disintermediation of each enterprise's user resources, to maximize their own value and create the best user experience. With the development of intelligence, the company's important assets will be migrated to the cloud. Finally, all the service logic and all product intelligence will precipitate and feedback in the cloud. Any platform or product that attempts to robbery between the cloud and users will eventually disappear in the air of the Internet of Things.

Therefore, cultivating the cloud is not only a platform vendor's need to do, but every smart home participant needs to attach great importance to it. In the logic of product use, localization decisions are not made as much as possible, but the policies are clouded. Many traditional companies will think that if the product's logic strategy is in the cloud, what if the network is broken? This problem is like what would happen if the electricity was broken after the Second Industrial Revolution replaced the steam engine. After all things are interconnected, wisdom is concentrated in the cloud. Everything in the physical world is like dust. When the machine finishes self-learning and self-programming, mankind will be closer to God and Caesar's return to Caesar, just believe in God!

Smart home cake on mass market

The 2010-2015 China Smart Home Industry Development Trends and Investment Opportunities Report predicts that China's smart home market will reach 124 billion yuan in 2015, and the 100 billion-scale Blue Ocean market has attracted many manufacturers to rush into them, regardless of the operator. Internet giants, regardless of smart home new show or traditional home appliance industry, are all big cakes.

In recent years, with the maturity and rapid development of technologies such as big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and human-computer interaction, the smart home market has also evolved from concept to reality. At the same time, industry competition has become increasingly evident. According to the "2010-2015 China Smart Home Industry Development Trends and Investment Opportunities Research Report," the forecast for the smart home market in China will reach 124 billion yuan in 2015. The 100-billion-level Blue Ocean market has attracted many vendors to rush into it, regardless of the operator. Or Internet giants, regardless of the new home of smart home or traditional home appliance industry, are coveted on this big cake.

From the introduction period to the growth period, smart homes set off a global boom

At the recent CES 2015, we saw many “bright highlights”, such as Whirlpool smart washing machines, SleepIQ smart beds, Notifi smart doorbells, and Sengled smart light bulbs. In the eyes of consumers, at this CES, most of the smart home products are only extensions and maturity of the past concepts, and they are not much creative; however, from the operator's point of view, they have been jointly developed by domestic and foreign manufacturers for more than a decade. With advancement, the smart home market has entered the growth period from the lead-in period. This emerging market is full of opportunities.

In fact, the development of smart homes in China has been more than a decade, but due to premature technology is not mature, did not identify the entry point, most manufacturers just thunder and rain, has been speculating concept, the market is developing very slowly.

The three major operators have deployed smart homes as early as a few years ago. In 2010, China Telecom and Haier signed a "E-store project" strategic cooperation agreement. The two sides cooperated in smart homes and other areas; in the same year, China Unicom also took the lead in the United States and launched 3G smart air-conditioning; in 2011, China Mobile launched a TD-based - The “livable pass” of SCDMA wireless communication technology and Internet of Things technology, comprehensive optimization of lifestyle and living environment from security warning, remote control of home appliances, and wireless routing. However, the performance of each company is not good. Both the products and the promotion are at the bottom, and the operator's advantages are not fully realized. The most important thing is that operators' employees have few Internet genes. Smart homes are not the areas where they are good at. Therefore, operators have not yet found exports on the Internet of Things.

Influx of smart home market, there are a large number of Internet companies, they have introduced set-top boxes, routers, WIFI sockets, smart switches and other smart home products. Today, smart homes are increasingly becoming a new outlet in the Internet of Things industry. From the layout to competition, home appliance manufacturers, Internet companies, and traditional technology giants have begun to adopt strategic alliances to speed up the layout of the smart home market. At the end of 2014, Midea and Xiaomi reached a strategic cooperation agreement and will carry out strategic cooperation in smart homes, their ecological chains and mobile internet in various modes, including the integration of the two sides in smart homes, e-commerce, logistics, and strategic investment. In early 2015, Haier and Meizu's cross-border cooperation, Meizu settled in Haier U smart home platform, Haier will open its U platform SDK to Meizu, Meizu mobile phone can control all Haier smart home products, while Meizu will also open the system level to the Haier apps permission.

Different from the domestic smart home market, the foreign operator market places more emphasis on home security. European telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom launched its own SmartHome platform in 2013, supporting smart sockets, smoke alarms, motion sensors, window and door monitoring, smart sockets, smoke alarms, and heating controls. In October 2014, Vodafone launched a smart home package called Gigasetelements. AT&T launched the DigitalLife after being unwilling, mainly including two modules: security module and dynamic sensing module, focusing on door and window surveillance, surveillance cameras and garage monitoring.

The key to integrating into the mass consumer market is to enhance the user experience

Drew consultants believe that the entire industry chain is now focusing on the smart home market, on the one hand, the development of an Internet company as the representative of a single function, homogeneity and low popularity of smart single products (smart bulbs, smart washing machines, televisions Boxes, WIFI routers, etc.) are on the one hand the "platform" strategy represented by the traditional industry, but for mass consumers, smart homes are not smart single product competitions, nor are they platform-based solutions. What is more important is that The service content provided by operators, maintenance and repair, user interaction, network operation, and a very important security system, etc. These comprehensive factors constitute the key to the smart home in the mass market, and the ultimate competition is user experience rather than preemption.

Relative to the homogenization of smart home products launched by the Internet industry, operators should firmly grasp their inherent advantages: years of home customer operation experience and a good user base, occupy a leading position in the mobile communications market, adequate resources, market The promotion is strong and the operators' products are faster and easier to be known and recognized by ordinary users. Only by taking advantage of the congenital advantages of the pipeline and breaking through the smart home market, operators can suppress competitors and obtain revenue.

The bottleneck highlights, operators should force smart home should "three steps"

At present, there are mainly the following bottlenecks in the smart home market: First, there is no unified industry standard for smart homes, and companies are independent of one another; products are irrelevant to each other; second, companies blindly follow the trend, lack of user research, similar products and poor practicality, and are not accepted by the general public; R & D needs to invest a lot of money, most companies do not have the ability to continue to innovate, can only follow the direction of the wind, resulting in a small scale, product prices remain high.

Operators in the smart market should break through and develop in three phases:

In the first stage, make a product with good experience for the general public to use. This strategy starts from smart single-items and identifies the user's demand points, such as selecting smart items that users frequently use and paying high attention, or import products of smart homes, such as mobile phones, routers, TVs/boxes, and so on. , Low prices, take this product to open the smart home market. Only by gaining popularity from the public can we seize the market and drive high-end customized consumption. Online, on the one hand, can be linked with the business hall to increase the construction of user experience stores, so that ordinary consumers can feel the convenience and comfort that smart home brings to people's lives at any time; on the other hand, we must ensure the quality and after-sales service of smart home products. At the level, brand awareness should not be reduced due to poor product quality and inadequate services.

In the second stage, since the user will use it well, they will buy a second one. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare for the interaction of different products, expand the market further from the intelligent single product, and achieve data interaction between different products. At the same time, we will focus on increasing marketing efforts, strengthening the construction of corporate brands in the field of smart homes, improving people’s ways of thinking, understanding smart home products, and understanding the status quo of smart home industry development, thus dispelling the initial “chaos concept” of smart homes. understanding.

In the third stage, multiple products are used to form an intelligent system to further realize interoperability and interaction of cross-product data and create a smart home ecosystem. Not only can data products interoperate between different products, but they can also be converted into active behaviors without users. Going to human intervention, build a cross-brand, cross-category interactive platform with sophisticated smart products. All products follow a unified standard and seamlessly connect to a unified platform. Operational platformization is the development trend in the future. The biggest business opportunities for smart home manufacturers and system integrators are high-end customized services after platform operations. After shuffling, smart home manufacturers and integrators with strong brand names will usher in a huge space in the development of high-end customized customer markets.