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People still go into the bank to pay bills. There are adults who refuse to get a smartphone. There are buses that allow you to pay the driver in coins—and get change. There are computers on the counters of high street shops that, judging by the screen, are running Windows 3.1.
While people in the media, marketing and tech communities wax lyrical about the wonderful benefits of hyperconnected futures and frictionless interactions, out there in the real world there are more skeptics, nay-sayers and holdouts than we care to mention.
The apocryphal and likely misattributed Henry Ford quote, “If I’d asked the public what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” speaks to the resistance of consumers who are quite happy with the way things are (thank you very much).
And true enough, though progress is inevitable and resistance is ultimately futile, our industry is obsessed with using innovation to revolutionize the consumer experience in the blink of an eye, but without any consideration as to the speed or enthusiasm for adoption by the masses.
The difference between invention and innovation
The trouble is this: There is confusion over invention versus innovation. Generating a new solution is a mere invention. But innovation means scaling and embedding those inventions to bring about a fundamental and widespread change in approach. And that needs planning. Lots of it.
Do we give enough consideration to the public’s resistance to change as they rebel against old formats being forcibly taken away from them?
Phil Rowley, head of futures, Omnicom Media Group Europe
In their book The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson discuss how for many years the introduction of electricity into industrial processes was effectively just a crowbarred affair, and it wasn’t until factories were redesigned from scratch with electric motors that the invention was able to flourish and scale. Technologies may seem to burst onto the scene, but in reality they take decades to bed in.
Here’s an up-to-date example: Today, some commentators are confident about electrical vehicles (EVs) being an imminent replacement for internal combustion systems. Yet there is still so much work to be done on scaling charging infrastructure, addressing the recyclability of batteries and winning over millions upon millions of drivers before a full EV transformation can happen.
The question is: Do we give enough consideration to the public’s resistance to change as they rebel against old formats being forcibly taken away from them?
Hype and disappointment in the media industry
In the tech and media industries, we can see the same effect. There’s so much talk of blockchain and crypto, of NFTs and the metaverse, and there is no doubt that these inventions will come to play a huge role in our future. But it’s as if their mere existence is proof of their widespread use. And it is not. A technology’s maturity is only as fast as its penetration within the market.
Usually, that assumption of penetration can be seen reflected in the Gartner Hype Cycle, the model that describes a technology’s trajectory from “savior of the universe” to “yesterday’s news” and back again. We usually start lauding a technology just as it approaches “the peak of inflated expectations,” the point right before it plummets into “the trough of disillusionment.”
Thus, what happens is initially, commentators convince the audience that a new technology is about to explode and change life forever, but when that speed of change is sluggish, and when those skeptics dig in and enthusiasm wanes, those commentators turn face. Then it becomes a race to establish street cred by seeing who can tear down a once-vaunted opportunity the fastest.
Case in point: There’s been much commentary on the potential of the metaverse, but there’s also an increasing number of people lining up to pour cold water on it as it fails to blossom overnight.
Transition is as vital as innovation
It all keeps coming back to the same point: We aren’t thinking in long enough timelines, and we’re not seeing things from the consumers’ perspective. Fortunately, there are a couple of things we can do to gain a more objective viewpoint.
First, it’s easier said than done, but we need to get outside our marketing and advertising bubble. We need to understand how consumers out there in the real world view change, and how quickly they adopt new solutions and why.
What is it that makes them embrace smartphones at such speed but curse automatic checkouts? Why are we happy to sign up to online banks with lurid colored credit cards, but not embrace cryptocurrencies as a mainstream solution, despite its proponents blustering about how it heralds the biggest financial revolution of all time?
Second, despite what we’ve heard about the accelerating speed of life, we still need to look at a long-term plan when thinking about how to encourage consumers to adopt new behaviors. Be mindful of the oft-quoted Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Thus, brands must be realistic about the time it will take for the switchover. Are older options still available? Are those old options compatible with new infrastructure? How quickly can a product be phased in and out? Is it to the brand’s detriment that it has taken choices away from people?
It’s not that change is a bad thing. Far from it. After all, we don’t often lament the decline of bus ticket inspectors, video rental stores or Sony Walkmans. Ultimately, however, while we are constantly wowed by the frequency of emergent tech solutions, we must also keep in mind that the rate of their coming into being is not the same rate that they will be adopted by real world users.
