Smart home brands are marketing to people who've already decided

Carolyn Rush Crouse, senior strategy director at Koto LA, takes a closer look at the smart home sector, explaining how tone, interaction design and connectivity logic are important brand decisions.

Smart home brands might have mastered the language of convenience, but they still haven’t learned how to make people care.

Most brands in the category are saying the same thing, whether it's a promise of frictionless convenience and seamless integration or feature-led phrases about connectivity. It tells you what the product does, and not much more. That’s where the problem lies.

The category is still overwhelmingly product-led, speaking to relatively tech-savvy people who are already comparing devices and hardly need convincing to make the purchase. It converts demand that already exists, but it doesn’t create it.

The chasm nobody's crossing

The majority of consumers still on the outside of the tech bubble are asking much simpler questions, like what does this actually add to my life? What kind of home does this create for me?

We put this to the test at Koto, asking our global team to share what smart home devices they actually own and how they think about them. The products they use weren’t surprising, but how they talked about them was. Alfie loves his smart bulbs because he doesn't have to "rethink how you turn lights on/off." James chose Google cameras not for the specs, but because he already had Google Mesh WiFi – "a one app situation," he said. Phébe calls her Alexa "she," and when asked how it's going: "She's not as good as she used to be. Bless her."

These are strategists, who spend their careers dissecting brand behaviour, and they even talk about their smart home devices the way they talk about habits, relationships and trusted companions. So why do the brands in this category still sound like a feature spec sheet?

The emotional barrier is the product brief nobody writes. A family with young kids has a completely different relationship with ambient technology than a young professional in a compact flat. A countryside home needs different stories than a city apartment.

Right now, almost no one in the category is telling any of these stories. They're all telling the same one, badly.

This is also why smart homes remain nascent across much of Europe despite mature penetration in the US. European consumers haven't been given a compelling picture of what a smarter home would feel like for them, in their homes, with their actual lives. An enormous opportunity, left entirely on the table.

The Alexa paradox

A 2023 Oxford University study found over 200 million Alexa-enabled devices in homes worldwide. More interesting than the number is how people reconcile living with them. Users manage their discomfort in three ways: they humanise the device, accept the data trade-off as a condition of modern life and set deliberate limits. Keeping Alexa out of certain rooms. Switching it off during private moments. It's a negotiation, not a surrender.

Phébe does exactly this. She's a self-described "big Alexa household," uses it for lighting, alarms, timers and shopping lists, and loves a keyless entry system through a separate brand entirely. The relationship is fluid, conditional and actively managed. And yet she's loyal. That is the kind of brand relationship most companies spend decades trying to build, and Amazon largely backed into it.

What this tells us is that consumers are already doing the emotional labour that brands should be doing for them. They're building the trust narratives, the personality frameworks, the mental models that make an ambient device feel acceptable in an intimate space. Brands that don't actively shape this leave it entirely to chance. And chance produces inconsistency, not loyalty.

The Shot by iPhone moment the category is waiting for

Apple didn't sell the iPhone 6 camera by listing its megapixels. They launched Shot by iPhone. Billboards across the world showing what ordinary people could create with it, film festivals built around the aesthetic. They didn't advertise a camera upgrade. They advertised a creative identity and the product was proof, not pitch.

Smart home brands need their version of that. Not your home, connected, but something more honest, more specific, more alive. A picture of a life genuinely made better by this stuff. Because the audience isn't impressed by spec sheets anymore, and they never really were. They want to see themselves in the story.

The brands beginning to move in the right direction are the ones shifting from describing systems to defining feelings. Google Nest frames itself as an energy companion, where the emphasis isn't the thermostat but the sensation of a home that takes care of you. Ring's latest brand work finds the feeling behind the feature: staying close to what matters, whether that's your dog, your front door or your baby's first steps when you're not there to see them. Both still have the product at the centre, but the narrative has moved from what it does to what it lets you feel. That's the shift. It sounds obvious, yet almost nobody in the category has actually made it.

What that actually looks like

Stop selling convenience. Everyone owns that word and it's been bled dry. Define the life instead, specific, human and emotionally true. Build a brand experience that survives installation, because if the brand disappears the moment the product is set up, the relationship is already over. Recognise that tone, interaction design and connectivity logic are brand decisions, not just product ones.

The smart home brands people genuinely embrace over the next decade will be the ones that understood early they weren't selling hardware. They were shaping the culture of the modern home. The ones with enough personality and warmth that people actively want them there, the way Phébe, despite the data trade-offs and the minor irritations, still calls her Alexa she. That's a much higher bar than "frictionless," but it's the only one that matters.