A New Home Means New (Digitized) Opportunities

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With 40% of consumers saying they will make additional home improvements in the near future, as a new normal develops, clearly a new home will emerge as well. This presents a major opportunity for brands to provide the products and services that enable consumers to build and enjoy their perfect spaces, while socially distanced.

The COVID-19 crisis has created great challenges for America, but this is not the first time the country has had its back against the wall. With the number of new virus cases declining overall, some may argue a recovery is already in its early stages.

“Because now the pandemic is in month five, consumers have had time to sort out their personal finances,” said Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy. “Consumers are now planning out their budgets for the rest of this year, as well as for 2021, and in that regard, they’re starting to think, Hm, maybe I should invest in home improvements.”

Britton provided this insight during a recent Suzy webinar, “State of Consumer: The Future of Home,” where he was joined by Lindsey Mather, deputy editor at Domino Magazine. 

For over 15 years, Domino has been the premier destination for building a stylish home — and life. Through inspirational and service-driven home tours, DIYs, shopping guides, and more, Domino celebrates personal style and self-expression through the lens of emerging and expert tastemakers, and enables our audience to discover their own design aesthetic. . The two examined the results of a Suzy poll of 1,000 consumers, who were asked about the various ways they are spending money today, and how they plan to, going forward. 

The data showed that people across the U.S. are adapting to our “new normal” particularly by reimagining the role of their home, where they’ve had to spend so much time of late. An overwhelming majority of poll respondents said they have repurposed some area of their home already, and 40% of consumers say they will make additional home improvements in the near future. 

Such research, thus, also reveals the most effective ways brands can stay in lockstep with fresh consumer demands — even perhaps by pivoting a bit. If they want to do just that, the direction in which they should shimmy is toward digitization. 

COVID-19 forced a lockdown of many bars across the country. People responded by hosting more often in their homes, stocking up their newly furnished home bars with liquor purchased online. 

Home-delivery companies operating in the spirits space, including Bevvi and others, were at the ready. After shelter-in-place orders began in March, by the time mid-April arrived, according to Nielson, alcohol delivery via platform apps jumped 250%.

“I know that a lot of the liquor companies and beer companies are really going to try and pivot toward this” digitized approach, Britton said. “While there’s Instacart for consumers getting groceries delivered, there wasn’t much adoption going into this [crisis] of alcohol delivery.” 

He added that the pandemic has “really accelerated” this space, and predicted that there is “certainly going to be some winners” coming out of it.

Not only have the purposes of homes changed due to the pandemic — they’ve now become bars, as well as restaurants and gyms — but the process of buying an entire home has been radically altered, with digital technology entering the fold. 

“So many homes have now been bought sight unseen,” Britton said. “The real estate industry really has had to respond very quickly to the notion that people who are selling their homes did not want to have live showings … so a host of new technologies have come out to allow homes to be shown virtually.”

“It’s not just home buying that’s going digital,” Mather added. She cited the Home-X platform, which facilitates video calls between socially distanced expert repairmen and homeowners, who are talked through fixes over the line. Mather characterized the service as “like telehealth for your leaky faucet.”

Britton said in response that if he were the brains behind a tech company such as Hewlett-Packard, for example, he’d imitate the Home-X approach and launch a virtual service instructing people on the ways they can build the perfect home office. 

“Let your brand be behind that,” Britton said. “That’s what consumers need right now; they need that expert advice and insights to better their lives, and I think it’s a great opportunity for brands to come in as that trusted source to really help them.”

And these days their workers, particularly software engineers, can do just that, invading the space from the comfort and safety of their own home offices. 

For much more information and results from the Suzy research, you can view the entire webinar, “State of Consumer: The Future of Home” at Suzy.com.