Daniel J SaitBest Buy has announced that it will bolster its smart home offering in the US by stocking Amazon Echo and Google Home. The retail giant has been doing well in the US as of late, and is now looking to corner the market in DIY smart products. The company’s desire to do well in the sector is underlined by the fact that is it willing to give considerable room to one of its main rivals, Amazon, and is expanding presence for the Alexa platform and Google Home in all 700 of its stores.
It’s not massively surprising to see Best Buy dedicate room to the Alexa and Google Home platforms, after all the company has its own range of smart home products that connect directly with the two. What is surprising is that Best Buy is dedicated so much room to both Amazon and Google. The current plan is to roll-out large 10ft x 4ft interactive displays giving consumers the chance to experience Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
UK Disaster
Best Buy has always had a strong smart home/home cinema offering with its Magnolia brand, however those with a good memory will remember that when Best Buy launched in the UK, things did not go to plan. In fact it flopped big time. By 2012 the retail giant had given up on its quest to shake up the UK AV market, which had launched with such a fanfare in May of 2008 in partnership with the Carphone Warehouse. Despite the reported £1.1 billion investment, the company’s plan to deliver competitive prices and American-style customer service was a disaster.
This served to underline the huge differences that existed then and still exist between the UK and US markets when it comes to technology and most importantly how consumers want to interact with and purchase it. The store sold decent mid-range kit, well laid out, to the US eye it did everything right. However, it does not seem like that was the problem. The problem was the US-style customer service, the UK staff’s inability to deliver it and, more importantly, the consumer’s dislike of what feels to a UK audience like unwanted and over the top attention. The running joke at the time was that as soon as the American trainers had returned to the states, everyone went out the back for a cigarette.
So, will the mass DIY install market every really take off over here? Keen DIYers don’t need or want the type of explanation of how the product works and what to do with it that a retail store can provide, they will just buy it, probably online and then have fun working it out themselves. But what about everyone else?
To begin a journey into home automation, consumers can buy an Amazon Echo from places like Currys, Argos and, of course, direct; all places where advice is certainly not a business priority. The same goes for Goggle Home. The only hope for some sensible guidance might come from middle England’s favourite retailer, John Lewis, which stocks both products.
The Amazon platform is of course all over the pro-side of the market in the UK, almost every automation platform and many, many standalone products now have compatibility, and as voice activation continues to grow, increasingly the functionality will disappear inside the hardware. Google Home is behind, but is working hard to catch up.
So, what does all this mean? Well lots of commentators say that the European/UK smart home business is behind the US and will eventually follow the US trend. In short, automation products will become standard in UK retail and will potentially put lots of pressure on the pro install market.
Do European’s want to be ‘sold’ home automation
Well personally, this observer would not agree. The US is ahead in some respects, products are often developed in the US and come here after launching in America, although cycles are quicker than they used to be. I would argue UK and many European markets are not behind the US, they are just different. And this is key, particularly in the UK, if people simply do not want the kind of close attention that the effective retail selling of automation needs (Best Buy will tell you about that) then this leaves the door open for the installer to continue to offer a kind of customer service more suited to the UK psyche, something more personal, more real, less pressured. Certainly, the number of automated products that consumers will be able to buy from normal retail channels will increase and they will get better, however different attitudes to how to purchase, and in what context, will persist and might well give the UK/European installer and edge of their US counterparts.