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.