Most digital marketers rely heavily on customer reviews or teasers. However, when we collaborated with Samsung Electronics to run two field experiments, we uncovered a critical mismatch between messaging and audience.
We specifically targeted busy, dual-earner parents. Our surprising finding is that benefit-driven formats like customer reviews or teaser pages were largely ignored. Instead, clear, feature-focused messaging outperformed the popular formats.
This field experiment demonstrates why a one-size-fits-all strategy fails in the complex smart home category, providing a necessary blueprint for engaging high-intent consumers with efficient, direct communication.
Purpose: The objective of this study is to explore the effect of family and message type interactions on the sales of smart home products. The study hypothesizes that dual-earner parents, a prolific segment of consumers, will indicate a greater willingness to pay for smart home products when exposed to characteristics-related marketing messages.
Design/methodology/approach: Two quasi-experimental studies were conducted to test the hypothesis. In collaboration with Samsung Electronics, the studies utilized different smart home product bundles (Smart Air Care and Smart Safety Care), recruited distinct participant groups (parents of children aged three to five and parents of children aged zero to three), and manipulated different types of benefits-related messages (a user review video and a teaser page).
Findings: In response to smart home product messaging, dual-earner parents exhibited greater willingness to pay when exposed to characteristics-related messages compared to benefits-related messages. This difference was not found among single-earner parents.
Originality: Challenging conventional marketing assumptions, the findings demonstrate that benefits-related messages do not universally appeal to smart home product consumers, while characteristics-related messages can increase willingness to pay among dual-earner segment. The collaboration with Samsung Electronics in a quasi-experimental setting strengthens the external validity of the results, suggesting that marketers should tailor messaging strategies based on the characteristics of customer segments.
Keywords: Smart home products, dual-earner parents, message type, Samsung Electronics
“… dual-earner parents’ willingness to pay nearly doubled when presented with characteristics-related messages compared to benefits-related messages, increasing by 163% in Study 1 and 162% in Study 2. This suggests that tailoring messages to this group could significantly boost market penetration and profitability in the competitive smart home product sector.”
I recently gave a lecture at Ecobee, a smart home product company in Canada. In this lecture, I compared two different approaches when bundling multiple smart home products.
One is product-centered bundling; they can select a hero product or a product that contributes to their sales significantly and then attach additional products randomly. The other is human-centered (service-centered) bundling; they can select multiple products to form a service which helps consumers achieve their goals.
The product-centered bundling was previously employed among Samsung designers; they selected Galaxy mobile phone or Samsung TV and then added smart door lock or smart plug to create Multi Device Experience. However, we proposed them to adopt the human-centered (service-centered) approach.
The more I become interested in cognitive interventions, the more I delve into motivational goals. This is because we are able to change their behaviors if we know why consumers do what they do. I wish Ecobee designers apply goal to solve their business problems.
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Reference 1
Kruglanski, A. W., Shah, J. Y., Fishbach, A., Friedman, R., Chun, W. Y., & Sleeth-Keppler, D. (2018). A theory of goal systems. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Department, Vol. 34, pp. 331–378). Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Academic Press.
The theory outlined in the present chapter adopts a cognitive approach to motivation. In the pages that follow we describe a research program premised on the notion that the cognitive treatment affords conceptual and methodological ad- vantages enabling new insights into problems of motivated action, self-regulation, and self-control. We begin by placing our work in the broader historical context of social psychological theorizing about motivation and cognition. We then present our theoretical notions and trace their implications for a variety of psychological issues, including activity experience, goal commitment, choice, and substitution. The gist of the chapter that follows describes our empirical research concerning a broad range of phenomena informed by the goal-systemic analysis.
Contemporary electronic manufacturers struggle with how to develop attractive bundles by combining their existing smart products. In the present work, we propose Goal Based Bundling (GBB) by drawing on the academic research of goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al. 2018) and shed light on two previously ignored aspects of bundling strategy: service and glue product. We applied our GBB to a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics, whose goal was to develop new product bundles for kids by combining multiple smart home products. We constructed a framework of Samsung Electronics’ smart products and then visualized it on its sales website. A UI design conveying the value of smart products bundle was developed based on GBB structure. We discuss the process and the result of our project to provide insights into the product managers who combine existing smart products to develop a bundle.
Contemporary electronic manufacturers struggle with how to develop attractive bundles by combining their existing smart products. In the present work, we propose Goal Based Bundling (GBB) by drawing on the academic research of goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018) and shed light on two previously ignored aspects of bundling strategy: service and glue product. We applied our GBB to a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics, whose goal was to develop new product bundles for kids by combining multiple smart home products. We constructed a framework of Samsung Electronics’ smart products and then visualized it on its sales website. A UI design conveying the value of smart products bundle was developed based on GBB structure. We discuss the process and the result of our project to provide insights into the product managers who combine existing smart products to develop a bundle.
“Although bundling tactics are frequently called upon in business, marketing research on product bundles is surprisingly sparse (Russell et al., 1999). This paper represents an attempt to identify bundling smart products by borrowing the key concepts from the Goal Systems Theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018). We posit that constructing a products bundle following a hierarchical goal structure overcomes the limitation of combining categorically dissimilar products. Moreover, it addresses an important role of service in smart product bundling.” (pg. 2898)
