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.”
