Belkin CMO says smart homes should just ‘take care of it’

Marketing a smart home platform may be the best example ever for the classic strategy of pitching the value, not the technology.

The key idea, Belkin International chief marketing officer Kieran Hannon told me recently, is that the products in your home can now “learn what you do — and take care of it.”

[Hannon will attend VentureBeat’s GrowthBeat Summit, taking place June 1 and June 2 in Boston.]

In fact, “just take care of it” could become the tagline for much of consumer technology in the age of smart things.

Or, as Belkin’s marketing campaign suggests as an expression for getting your smart home to take care of something, you should just “WeMo that.” WeMo is the name of Belkin’s smart home platform.

“It’s recrafting a whole new area of how people can use tech,” Hannon noted.

In a way, Belkin’s three main product groups represent the big evolutionary ways that people have used tech.

You’ve got the standalone Belkin computing products like surge protectors, the networked Linksys devices, and now the WeMo smart home. In the last, networking has evolved into intelligence, and the marketer’s task is to sell the value of that intelligence for your daily needs.

“It’s one thing to be connected” by the ‘Net, Hannon noted, but it’s another thing to have “a layer of intelligence for your needs.”

What people need is a technology that takes care of itself and that helps take care of managing all those criss-crossing paths of daily life. They don’t want their lawn sprinklered when it’s raining. They want some lights on and the iron off when they’re out, the capability to remotely close the garage door they inadvertently left open, and some sign that their elderly parents are doing fine without continually bugging them.

But, as the era of the smart home emerges, a key question is how consumers are supposed to compare one platform of home intelligence against another, such as Belkin’s versus AT&T’s versus Google’s Nest.

Not only is system intelligence a difficult thing to compare, these are home systems. It’s not like taking your smartphone into the AT&T store to compare features with a new model.

Tablestakes for these smart homes, of course, is that they need a giant ecosystem, and they must be easy to use.

The idea that it all just works together effortlessly is central in the WeMo site. And the company points out that the large number of WeMo compatible devices includes 70 percent of smart LEDs, plus such household standards as humidifiers, crockpots, and security cameras.

The platform is also integrated with IFTTT, the “if-this-then-that” service that enables easy adaptability for diverse circumstances through the creation of conditional “recipes” connecting apps, websites, and devices.

If the weather prediction calls for rain, for instance, text me a reminder to take an umbrella.

But AT&T, Google, and others can make a similar case about ecosystem and ease of use. Ultimately, Hannon agreed, marketing the smart home could come down to the marketer’s main asset: brand trust.