Confusion over exactly what 4G might be is leading many to think that they already have it, when, in fact, they don’t. Apart from the fact that such may put a damper on the adoption of 4G (again, whatever that is), such is illustrative of the level of confusion that today exists in the consumer marketplace and beyond. The carriers need to fix this situation or – gulp – the government might.
I ran across an interesting piece at Retrevo recently, entitled “Confusion and Skepticism May Impede 4G Adoption“. Well, no surprise there, but this caught my eye: “34% of iPhone owners mistakenly think they already have 4G”. Of course, no one who reads this blog would be so confused, but that’s truly an amazing number. Couple that with a few other findings noted, and 4G adoption may take a very long time indeed.
Normally I ignore most “market research” findings, but this study had a fairly large sample size (1,000) and the wording of the report summary leads me to believe – along with my own experience here – that this one has some validity. OK, let’s start with more than a third of iPhone users surveyed thinking they have 4G when such couldn’t possibly be the case. Part of this stems, as the report summary notes, from the iPhone 4 leading many to conclude that the “4” means “4G”. OK, fair enough, but who cares what 4G is called when it’s viewed as being too expensive by 30%, and 22% don’t think it’s worth the cost. And, with all the confusion, even government may get involved: a bill has been introduced in Congress to increase disclosure of exactly what it is consumers are buying.
It’s been inevitable, of course, that the carriers market improvements in their offerings using the “G” nomenclature, because that’s what industry insiders have used since 2G (circa 1993). And we’ve had pretty good agreement on Gs until 4G, which remains, as I’ve noted before, imprecise at best. But the bottom line here is who cares anymore what a given service is called, or what category it fits in? The name of the game now is price/performance and availability/reliability, and that really should be it. Any wireless service moves bits over the air. Where one can rely on a given level of service and what that service costs is all that matters.
Of course, if a consumer already assumes they have the best available because of a mistaken assumption, that’s problem for the carriers. And if a consumer assumes a service is too expensive (whatever that may mean to an individual consumer), that’s also bad for the carriers. And if the government decides that they need to step in to force the carriers to a particular way of doing business, well, that’s likely very bad for the carriers. And they have no one to blame but themselves.
But the solution isn’t – the good lord forbid – the government waddling in and helping to, um, clarify, yeah, let’s go with that, the situation. The government has never been good at such and, currently facing financial bankruptcy if not a complete bankruptcy of fundamental leadership, is better off, IMHO, getting back to the tasks set for it in the Constitution. And, regardless, the carriers should be warned: get your individual acts together and really serve your customers through education and value. While confusion sometimes means more sales, simply extracting cash from them isn’t the path to long-term success.
