Six major tangles in LED intelligence: How to solve the problem?

In the past year, smart lighting has been very popular. Many traditional companies and makers have launched their own products, but there has been no hit. In early 2015, Xiaomi launched a security-based smart home suite, and the entire industry began to return from smart home products to traditional smart home systems. But do we really see the essence of the smart lighting industry?

Earlier, Apple’s APPLE WATCH launch conference had just ended. The domestic smart watch and even smart hardware industry was rejoicing, thinking that Apple was nothing more than that, leaving us with market pricing space of less than 2,000 yuan to imitate. But as for smart homes, NEST could have become the target of our low-cost copying, but it lacks the soil for home applications and cannot be realized. HUE is also high-key and modest. In the absence of foreign giants, can domestic companies find their own way of smart home innovation?

Based on the practice, observation and thinking on the front line of the market, we summarized the six major failures of smart home. In this uncertain smart home market, we need to quickly make corrections through trial and error. Innovation is to avoid stupid failures and embrace inevitable failures. And many of our companies have been spinning in the traditional structure, unable to see clearly, and unable to escape defeat. The opinions in this article may be biased and may even offend colleagues in the industry, but in the Internet age, isn’t it important to have a distinctive personality and not be a masked person? The following is just a suggestion for everyone to discuss.

One of the dilemmas: finding what is needed

Many companies began to reflect on their product strategies after launching smart products that were ignored by the market. Therefore, looking for rigid needs has become a clarion call for struggling and frustrated enterprises. It seems that if you find rigid needs, you have found the magic weapon to win. Without rigid needs, it is false demand and nonsense. I am the pioneer in the smart home industry who has learned from the experience.

But are smart products driven by rigid needs? As the most representative representative of intelligence, was the smartphone driven by necessity? Apple's smartphones subverted Nokia's feature phones. Is it because they discovered a rigid need? The ability to find exactly what is needed has always been the strength of traditional mobile phone manufacturers led by Nokia. But with the rise of mobile Internet and artificial intelligence, they can no longer find their way there. The rigid needs are still the same, but users no longer respond.

The essence of the smart market is not driven by rigid needs, but by scenario-redefined products. All functional smart products that are based on rigid needs will not occupy users' minds. Last year, many companies launched their own smart light bulbs and listed a bunch of functions in their introductions, hoping that one of the indicators of probability would be able to meet users' urgent needs, but no one applauded the result. Rigid demand is the pseudo-demand for smart products, and it is also the epitaph for functional products. Intelligence rests on the spiritual pursuit of the human group! Smart products are designed to shape new life scenarios or new lifestyles for users.

Dilemma No. 2: High Pricing

I just saw a smart light bulb yesterday, which is positioned to wake up from sleep. Of course, it also has many other functions superimposed on it, and the price is more than 400. Many other products on the market, such as smart kettles, etc., also have price tags that blind the user's eyeballs, so it is impossible for them to retain the user's eyeballs.

I once cooperated with a well-known home appliance company to develop a smart water purifier. They told me that the company stipulated that the market pricing of the company's smart products must be at least three times higher than the new increased cost. That is, even if the standard WIFI module of the smart product is reduced to 20 yuan in price, their price will therefore increase by more than 100 yuan, not to mention other supporting costs. Traditional companies still want to add selling points to their products through intelligent functions to obtain higher premiums. In fact, this goes against the essence of intelligent products. Smart products are designed to privatize users, embody a true closed-loop experience, and tap users’ backward value to form transfer payments.

Therefore, selling products as isolated products and using smart functions to gain profits will make it difficult to gain a foothold in the smart product field at least, and users will not pay for it. Cost price is king, and acquiring the first batch of severely hungry users and forming word-of-mouth self-growth is the correct path for market evolution. Of course, there is another extreme, which is to reduce costs and launch low-priced smart products at the expense of user experience. Cost price is different from low price. Smart products cannot open up emerging markets with low price, and the loss of user experience is not worth the loss.