Amazon buys Roomba and registers another achievement on the way to the vision of the smart home

If you thought that Amazon has no more room to grow - think again.

The purchase of the Roomba brand by the e-commerce giant may symbolize a new era in digital marketing - and it is different from anything we have known to date

Ehud Basis

11/08/2022

Thursday, August 11, 2022, 2:42 p.m. Updated: 2:55 p.m.

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The group of marketing people in Israel. (Photo: Unsplash, Yaron Other)

About a week ago, Amazon announced the purchase of Roomba, the parent company of AirRobot.

On a strategic level, Amazon has already hinted in the past that it is interested in expanding its business beyond the marketplace, cloud and commerce, and supposedly there is indeed something a little different here that may provide it with a new revenue stream from worlds where it did not have a significant foothold before.

For years, Amazon has formulated the vision of the "smart home" that will rely on environmental intelligence that can help it sell more products through a deep understanding of user behaviors, activities, actions and even desires, far beyond what the company can derive from analyzing the consumer's historical purchases.

There is no doubt that Alexa is the center of gravity of the vision and the tool that helped her make it a reality, at least partially.

As of July 2022, over 300 million households in the world are connected to Alexa and help Amazon realize its vision while using its variety of products.

As part of the vision, Amazon is trying to move away from the worlds of privacy and cloud-based products, and move to hardware products that sit at the endpoint - that is, inside our homes, thus creating direct interaction with the customer.

Already today, as part of the smart home vision, Amazon has quite a few products such as the Echo, an interactive video phone for children, an entry bell for the smart home and Astro, the home "assistant robot", which will be based on Roomba technologies, and a host of other products.

The robot that started as a cleaner got a promotion.

iRobot (Photo: Unsplash)

Alert-based buying opportunities

From the marketing side, there is an opportunity here for something a little different.

As the world of digital advertising moves from the worlds of cookies to the worlds of contextual and predictive data models, this move by Amazon brings the opportunity of putting "digital sales agents" on the ground.

Think about it for a moment: let's say that tomorrow Amazon decides that it will release a new (and more expensive of course) model of AirRobot that scans our house while moving.

He is able to discover, among other things, that our sofa is dirty, and offer us to buy a stain remover spray (on Amazon of course), or even sofa cleaning services on sale.

In another scenario, the robot will text us when the food in the dog's dish runs out and offer a sale on a new food brand, or will act as a "house guard" if someone breaks into it, filming everything that happens without the thief knowing.

In short, the very presence of the robot in the house creates buying opportunities, and as long as the functionality of the robot is not compromised - to clean the house for us, you can take it to all kinds of places.

What can you expect from Amazon?

Marketers love to float creative thoughts and ideas on how anything can translate into a marketing campaign or sales generator.

I don't really believe on a practical level that the purchase of Roomba by Amazon was made for the reasons I mentioned above.

I do think that precisely in the long term and strategically, Amazon was mainly targeting the AirRobot mapping system here more than anything else.

Once Amazon knows how to map our home and learn the processes that occur on the fly (for example: I just turned the downstairs room into an office instead of a bedroom), the potential of all the tactics I reviewed above will become applicable in a reasonable effort.

As with any purchase, opportunities may arise to maximize profits in the immediate time frame.

Sometimes the easier integration between two companies that only a minute ago were completely strangers, is to think about product synergy (Alexa Hair and Cam).

What does the company have to offer its clientele that did not exist in the market until now, in a way that would be easier for it to start with, just before investing in complex developments that rely on that purchase?

is a digital marketing expert and leads the marketing department at Piggy

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• Roomba

• iRobot

• Amazon

• smart House

• the internet of things