Determinants of smart home adoption and differences across technology readiness segments

Smart home technologies (SHTs) encompass a wide range of products and services that fulfill users' needs and wants regarding the enhancement of the quality and comfort of their daily lives. Despite the pervasive impact of these technologies, SHT penetration is still growing at a relatively slow pace. A prominent reason of this might be inadequate understanding of the factors that motivate consumers to embrace SHTs. However, it is difficult to explain the adoption of SHTs with a replication of traditional adoption models due to differences in contextual factors. In addition, existing models solely use conventional adoption variables from the consumer perspective and exclude the business viewpoint. Hence, to fill this gap, initially, in-depth interviews with industry experts have been conducted and some predictive variables that were not mentioned in the literature have been identified. Consequently, these variables were used to enrich the existing diffusion of innovation (DOI) model and offer an extended SHT adoption framework. Based on this framework, value superiority, consumer protection, design & reputation, enjoyment, complexity, and compatibility have been extracted through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) as the dimensions of SHT adoption. However, the relative impact of these dimensions may be different for distinct consumer segments. To identify these differences and better design marketing and communication efforts, it is crucial to consider different characteristics of user segments and cohorts. For this purpose, users were classified into meaningful segments based on Technology Readiness Index (TRI) 2.0. Therefore, first, the TRI 2.0 variables were grouped into two categories as technology motivators and technology inhibitors after running another EFA. Based on these two dimensions, users were grouped under three segments after cluster analysis as Tech Savvies, Tech Yin-Yangers, and Tech Mediocres. Ultimately, the final objective of this research is to discover the differences among these segments in terms of their attitude toward and intention to adopt SHTs. Subsequently, independent regression analyses have been run to figure out the relative impact of the six dimensions of SHT adoption on attitude toward and intention to adopt SHTs for three different clusters. It is observed that there are significant differences among these segments that signal the vital importance of treating these consumer groups in distinct ways.