Follow the herd, or blaze your own trail?

This article by Ryan Bromley, Co-Founder of Kubu Smart Security 🔒 was first published in Total Installer Magazine April 2023 Edition.

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If someone asks you for Smart Tech on their windows and doors, what’s the first thing you think of? 

I bet you thought of a Smart Door Lock, didn’t you?

It’s not surprising, given that the lion’s share of all releases of fenestration based ‘Smart’ products to date are the exact things you were thinking of. Those big, ugly hunks of metal (or metal looking plastic), unceremoniously bolted to the inside of a front door, boasting about making your customers’ homes “Smart”.

Sales of Smart Locks have had a bumpy time over the years. 

Bad press surrounding product failures, the need for hard wiring your doors, high cost, difficulty to install, complicated after-sales support, and the lack of a whole home eco-system – not to mention hacking and other cyber threats – have all conspired to hold our industry back on the Smart frontier. 

The thing I don’t get is what’s so “Smart” about being able to lock and unlock doors? And why are so many companies trying to reinvent the same thing, just in a different package?

The current offering isn’t exactly that far removed from the access control systems that have been adorning commercial properties for decades, just moving the access control bit from the keep side to the lock side. It really is quite strange.

Research shows that consumers who might be interested in Access Control (i.e. being able to lock and unlock a door) totals just 6% of the market. Six.

On the other hand, 46% of consumers state the primary reason they use Smart tech products is to monitor their home while they are away, and 34% are using sensor and alerting systems on a daily basis.

So it seems pretty clear to me that as an industry, we’ve been focusing on the wrong things. 

This is the core principle that drove the development of Kubu in the first place – because doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result seems futile. 

At Kubu, we wanted to produce a product that has mass market appeal, provides all of the ‘Smart’ features and benefits that your customers want, doesn’t come with the risks associated (rightly or wrongly) with access control, doesn’t ruin the look of your customers’ investment, covers the entire home AND is affordable to all consumers. 

Quite the shopping list, that meant taking a completely different approach to all other products on the market at the time.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s definitely a place for Smart Locks, and there will always be customers that want them, but until the technology has got significantly better (and much smaller) I just can’t see them being mass market products.

The other place that we’ve been missing the mark is on how we commercialise Smart tech to help win business.

The slow sales of Smart Locks has scarred the industry, meaning confidence from you – our front line sales and installation teams – has been pretty low, in-turn leading to consumer uptake being lower too.  

One thing that is abundantly clear though, is that the consumer is ready to embrace smart tech.

As an industry, we’ve taken that lack of confidence and tried to use Smart tech as an upsell or just left it to the consumer to upgrade themselves. When we first launched, we accepted the general consensus and followed the herd, but soon realised that it just doesn’t work – so decided to make a change here too.

Since writing my last column, we’ve had an awesome month – with an amazing launch event for one of our fabrication customers, which helped to launch our new message to installers – “Smart as Standard™” 

Because you can kit out a whole home for the cost of just one ‘Smart Lock’, and all the “Smart” bits are completely concealed, we thought that instead of asking you guys to sell products that are only smart compatible, why don’t we help support you to sell products that are already Smart. 

That way, your customer gets all the features and benefits they want from Smart tech (without the ones they don’t), and you get a cracking differentiator over your local competitors – which inevitably results in more business.

The early signs couldn’t be more positive.  

After showing installers just like you the amount of support and benefits Kubu can give to your business, the phones haven’t stopped ringing!  Installers are seeing the benefits of going “Smart as Standard™” and want in now. 

Are you going to follow the herd, or are you going to join us in blazing a new trail?

Be Smart. Work with Kubu.