You need to innovate for the home of tomorrow!
Great innovators don’t just keep up to date with consumers’ needs …
They stay two or three paces ahead of the herd, by anticipating where change will drive expectations tomorrow!
Nowhere is change happening faster than in the home.
Robot Housekeepers
74% of Brits would love a robot in their home, if it helped with their chores!
Aeolus is a first generation housekeeper-robot. At the moment, it is touted as capable of sweeping up and fetching beer from the fridge, but with application of greater AI, who know what tasks it could become capable of undertaking?
Challenge: How can household care and maintenance brands going to get ahead of the robotics curve?
Kitchen Hydroponics
Freshly-grown, sustainable salad and vegetables in every kitchen?
Hyundai’s Nano hydroponic growing system is only a concept at the moment, but it puts the possibility of truly fresh, sustainable, pesticide-free garden-produce within easy reach of every kitchen chef.
Challenge: Which fresh produce business or supermarket chain is going to be the first to supply branded seeds, seedlings or even baby plants for instant results?
Subscription Everything
Once you’ve found a great solution, who needs to rethink it every time?
Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s and Amazon have all worked out that subscription models work brilliantly for staple products. After all, some things just need replacing when they run out! So if you can get the timing right, why wouldn’t consumers just sign up for regular repeats.
Challenge: Household cleaners, coffee and pet-foods are all ripe for subscription models. Whose going to be first?
Fridge as Family-Hub
As family life gets increasingly complex, every home needs a command centre.
Samsung is bidding to make the refrigerator the ‘hub’ for every smart-enabled family. It doesn’t just have internal cameras so it can keep track of your fridge-stock; it can also suggest recipes, integrate the family’s digital-diaries, display photographs – and playback video!
Challenge: How are chilled and non-chilled brands going to take advantage of triggers like recipe search, meal-time triggers and nearly-out-of-date moments?
Pet Daycare
30%+ of US homes have a dog – but what happens when their owners are at work?
Sony have tried to replace the animal with Aibo. It’s successful in Japan, but the ‘real thing’ still dominates elsewhere.
Innovative pet-tech businesses are however starting to emerge. There’s Rover for pet-sitters, Wag for dog-walkers, Petcoach for online vets, Whistle for pet-tracking and Petcube the wifi pet-camera to keep your pooch entertained whilst you’re out.
Challenge: Aren’t any of the pet-food businesses going to re-invent care?
Obesity Battleground
Circa 50% of the EU population are overweight and 20% are clinically obese.
Challenge: Isn’t the time ripe for brands to educational-aids, food-solutions and emotional cheerleaders that use AI to turn every home into a temple of healthy-eating!
Access Everyone
The reinvention of the lobby/hallway
Amazon introduced its Key concept in 2017 to combat porch piracy, but the reaction was somewhat muted. When Amazon starts rolling out its Wholefoods offering, we’re confident everything will change – and we’ll find ways of giving access to secure sections of our homes.
Challenge: Who is going to be first to redesign the hall to include refrigeration and freezer capacity?
Working Wherever
Remote working is reshaping the home and how it runs
Remote working could account for as much as 75% of the US workforce by 2020. That’s going to have a huge impact on everything from living-space requirements to the timing and structure of in-home meal-solutions.
Challenge: This is going to impact everything from fibre-optic networks to home furniture to ready-meals. Who’s ahead of the game?
Entertainment Overload
Families just aren’t watching telly like they used to
Netflix & Amazon on-demand, binge watching, channel hopping, multi-tasking, YouTube, Facebook, tablet surfing and fast-forwarding. People are consuming more media than ever, but they’re taking command and doing it in their own way.
Challenge: As traditional screen-makers go bigger and bigger, some like Keeker are aiming to reinvent the experience
Age & Disability Friendly
20%+ of the US population will be over 65 by 2020
Rather than enter assisted living facilities, 30%+ of people with infirmities or disabilities want to stay in their own homes. Technology has the potential to make homes significantly smarter, so they can retain their independence.
Challenge: Who is going to invent the first ‘active ageing’ brand? One that doesn’t just help consumers age gracefully, but also keeps them doing the things they love for as long as possible.
Sleep Reinvented
Around 20% of European adults suffer from insomnia or have trouble sleeping.
Somnox is a ‘sleep robot’ and claims to help you sleep faster, longer and wake refreshed by synchronising with your sleep patterns.
Challenge: Which brand is going to create a unique space in the world of ‘enhanced sleep’? Sleep aids like Nytol, bed makers like Tempur-Pedic and even lighting businesses like Lumie with their body-clock wake-up light, operate on the edges … but no-one owns sleep yet!
Zero-Energy Home
Home energy consumption has shot up by 35% in 30 years – is the zero-energy home a pipe-dream?
Predictably, no energy utility company is taking the lead in home-power generation. It’s been left to disrupters like Tesla Power Wall and Solar Roof to really generate any excitement – yet in Japan 70% of homes being built by Sekisui House are zero-energy already!
Challenge: Who’s going to start building brand propositions around the proposition of lifetime low-energy utilisation?
Water-Economy
Water shortages could soon become a fact of life
We’ve already seen water shortages in California and Cape Town. How long before they’re joined by major conurbations like Sao Paolo and London?
The average American home gets through 140+ gallons a day! With toilets consuming over 25% of daily indoor water use in the average American home, and washing machines 17%, appliance design is clearly ripe for a revisit.
Challenge: Lower-water usage will bring fresh challenges to manufacturers of everything from washing powders, loo cleaners and household disinfectants. Who’s ready for the eco-friendlier challenge?
In-Home Helpers
Consumers don’t want your product, they want your solution!
That’s why Ikea have invested in Task Rabbit – so now you can choose to have someone else erect your flatpack bookshelves. The insights behind Unilever Foundry collaborations with Cowash, ZipJet, Helping and Quiqup are also based on the insight that many consumers would rather pay a good-value expert than do stuff themselves!
Challenge: Consumers hate cooking, hate cleaning and hate DiY. There are lots of opportunties to ‘take pain’ out of all these categories – and build loyalty and value at the same time. Who’s going to do it?
Voice for Everything
40% of US homes will have “Digital Voice Assistants” before the end of 2018
They aren’t just sitting there gathering dust either – 75% of owners say they use them on a daily or weekly basis for everything from controlling the lights, to consulting WebMD and ordering from Amazon Prime.
Voice is likely to become the dominant form of search pretty soon, totally changing the rules of D2C decision influencing and engagement!
Challenge: A home full of non-communicating smart-devices isn’t delivering what consumers want. The device that becomes the ‘interpreter’ will rule them all!
Trends aren’t a solution on their own …
Trends gain their full power when they are harnessed as strategic challenges, structured as innovation springboards and creatively explored within inspiring, imaginative, creative workshops.
So, if your 2018 objectives include the delivery of game-changing strategic plans; the generation of disruptive ideas, or the creation of motivating consumer concepts that have the potential to optimise, renovate or innovate your brands … we should talk!