Research Shows Smart Locks Have Major Potential to Be Gateway for Smart Home Devices
Nearly half of smart door lock owners purchased a smart door lock as their first smart home device — a fairly sizable margin over other popular devices.
Analyst firm Parks Associates recently conducted a consumer survey highlighting interesting insights about purchase drivers, consumer use and pain points of the smart lock market.
In the graph below, a particularly interesting insight emerges. Parks Associates finds almost one-half (47%) of smart door lock owners purchased a smart door lock as their first smart home device — by a fairly sizable margin over other popular devices.
This highlights the potential for smart door locks to be a gateway to other smart home devices, especially for users with a specific interest in home access control.
Note: Respondents were able to report that multiple devices were included in their first purchase. That is, they may have purchased multiple devices at the same time.
According to access control expert Matt Zimmer, vice-president marketing — Spectrum Brands HHI Security Hardware, this trend is encouraging, but not necessarily surprising.
“We’ve heard and read over the years that security, in general, is one of the primary gateways for consumers to enter the smart home arena,” he says. “So, the fact that smart locks come out on top in terms of the first smart-devices purchases helps confirms that long-standing fact. And it bodes very well for dealers looking to upsell consumers to other devices as part of a complete smart home ecosystem.”
Data presented in this Parks Associates study are drawn primarily from online surveys conducted in July 2020 and Q4 2019. The survey was fielded to 10,021 and 10,018 heads-of-broadband households in the United States in Q4 2019 and July 2020 respectively.
The full survey sample was split to show special topic questions to smaller groups. Some questions related to smart door locks were asked of a ~5,000 sub-segment of the full sample. Survey results are demographically representative of broadband households for both the full ~10,000 survey results as well as for each ~5,000-sample sub-group. Demographic quotas are set for age, gender, household income, and education.
Art Sesnovich is a principal and co-founder of Bulldog Communications.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our FREE digital newsletters!
Related Content
Security Is Our Business, Too
For professionals who recommend, buy and install all types of electronic security equipment, a free subscription to Commercial Integrator + Security Sales & Integration is like having a consultant on call. You’ll find an ideal balance of technology and business coverage, with installation tips and techniques for products and updates on how to add to your bottom line.
A FREE subscription to the top resource for security and integration industry will prove to be invaluable.
