Nest Thermostat: Business Analysis

In the last decade the use of persuasive technologies has expanded far beyond the business applications such as advertising, marketing, sales and e-commerce, and appeared in social domains including health management, education and learning (Hamari, Koivisto et al. 2014). Business applications focus more on product promotion, for example, in commerce interactive online stores whose pages were customized to user needs could persuade customers to buy certain products. While social domain considers not only life style, but also quality of human’s life and try to make life better. As an example, in health management persuasive technologies take form of mobile applications that remind users to drink water, do exercise more often, or help calculate

One example of such technologies is Nest thermostat (Yang and Newman 2012). Nest thermostat is smart thermostat which detects when user 's away or go to bed and base on that information change the room temperature. Nest could be programmed by the user through a schedule function that related to personalization of user’s temperature preference. Nest also shows a green leaf icon which means that user is energy efficient that related to virtual reward. Moreover, Nest provides energy history function where users can see their daily energy savings that related to self-monitoring persuasive

The reason could be in the difference between information presentation. Nest doesn’t provide a peer comparison and doesn’t give a suggestion how to save energy in an effective way, therefore users have no opportunity to see their progress. While Opower gives this opportunity and also it provides useful information according energy savings. We assume the combination of persuasive strategies that is used in Opower meter has better effect of persuading people to reduce energy consumption than Nest. However, the authors didn’t consider this question in the papers that was studied Nest and Opower meters. Thus, we want to test our hypothesis and find the reason why some persuasive technologies work while another fail. In the recent years researchers investigated different persuasive strategies and tried to find the best one that will cause the greater effect in terms of energy conservation in the long-term. There is a wide range of persuasive strategies that truly persuade people and call to action, but not all of them could be implemented in energy feedback due to different user preference, technical problems and