Strategy in TECH...
In a very bullish release from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the organization predicts that nearly half of all consumers in America (47%) will buy a technology product during Black Friday week, based on a newly completed survey. That result means 116 million Americans will buy tech – ten percent more than last year.
Security & Thermostats are Top Smart Home PrioritiesBeing the marketers that we are, when we heard that Houzz was going to present the results of their first ever Smart Home Trends Study at CEDIA 2016, well we put that on our schedule. At the appointed hour, we listened closely as Liza Hausman, Houzz’s Vice President of Industry Marketing and Dave Pedigo from CEDIA patiently went through and explained the results – and while the results were unremarkable, they were interesting nonetheless. And, there were a couple of surprises.
As is their normal practice, CEDIA released selected results from their 2016 Size and Scope of the Residential Electronic Systems Market survey in their booth during CEDIA 2016. The presentation this year, like last year, was made by Dave Pedigo. However, unlike last year, this year Pedigo has been put in charge of market research, a post that has been open since Erica Shonkweiler left some time ago.
Last year, we reported on the some of the surprising results from the survey. Some of those results were so surprising, they were unbelievable – and even Pedigo agreed with us that some didn’t appear proper. This year? Some of the results, if accurate, could be troubling.
Market researcher Strategy Analytics forecasts High Dynamic Range (HDR) TVs will be in 100 million homes in the United States by 2020. This is a relatively quick adoption for this new technology, which is used by many companies as a step-up feature in their better sets.
See more of the data predicting this rapid ramp-up of HDR TVs… [Read more…] about New Research: HDR TVs in 100 Million Homes by 2020
Market researcher eMarketer reports that the latest research on marketing trends for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) – and in this case, retailers – shows that email marketing remains the top tactic for both customer acquisition and retention. This research, pushes back the notion expressed by some, that email is losing momentum.
This morning we learned a stunning statistic – Pokémon Go, that new game that incorporates augmented reality and that is all the rage right now – has hit an impressive milestone. According to data from MFour Mobile Research, Pokémon Go is now on more Android smartphones than Twitter.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reported overall industry sales data for 2015 this week, revealing that for the first time in history streaming music was the single largest component of industry sales. Revenues from streaming sources accounted for 34.3% of total revenues, beating out music downloads from services like iTunes and others which accounted for 34% of total revenues.
Overall sales increased 0.9% to $7 billion, the first overall industry growth since 2011.
There is a lot of buzz surrounding Amazon’s Echo product, a tabletop computer featuring a voice-controlled digital assistant named Alexa. Alexa will play your favorite music, get your morning news update, find out today’s weather for you, and more. All you have to do is ask Alexa.
But before Alexa, we had Siri and other voice-controlled assistants, mostly associated with our favorite smartphone. But are consumers enamored with using voice-controlled assistants? A new study from marketing company 451 Research suggests that we don’t.
Much like the amazing growth in music streaming over the last few years, streaming TV has also seen an explosion in the number of users as well. This growth has been fueled in large part by the growing popularity of both original programming and the replay of popular shows on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Now new research data predicts that in 2016 streaming TV will reach the tipping point – more than half of all Americans will watch TV programming from streaming video services.
In a result that exceeded economists’ estimates, November overall housing starts jumped an impressive 10.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.173 million units. Well over the revised October rate of 1.062 million units, it also exceeded the 1.007 million units in November last year by 16.5%.
More importantly for our industry, single-family home construction rates jumped as well.
