Whether a conscious decision or not, marking tends to focus heavily on System 1 – trying to make people subconsciously elect to engage with and buy/consume a product either (almost) instantaneously or at a friction point. As such, marketing teams focus on continued exposure to the brand, and too often in this market, on the price above all else. But broadband truly is a transformative product. It has a potentially enormous, positive, effect on peoples lives. Both at work and at play it can make communication, collaboration and interaction with our surroundings effortless, seamless and instantaneous. The kicker for full fibre broadband is that most people don’t need it right now. System 1 Consumers don’t tend to think about broadband very often, and when they do it tends to be because they have encountered a friction point and are thus not in a positive mindset. They think through fast heuristic connections that don’t involve checks for accuracy and are often closer to intuition. It is a mental-set trap – a state of readiness to see certain things rather consider others. Typically when it comes to considering making a change (and linked, the option of changing provider – the goal we are trying to achieve) the thought process often follows the same question “Is it really worth the effort of changing anything?”. The answer tends to follow one of three paths: “No, I’ve tried changing in the past and it makes no difference.”;”Your provider says they are ‘Superfast’ and show a bigger number for download speeds”; and, the biggest and most common barrier”Changing is too risky and complicated” And inevitably that leads to a preference for staying with the status quo. Points one and two above overlap and it is only through engaging System 2 that we will have the opportunity to educate the consumer and facilitate customer onboarding, driving past the 30% take-up sticking point. The challenge in doing so…
Fear and apathy are the key system 1 responses that we need to overcome. We have to de-risk the process for consumers and in particular, overcome the preconceptions that System 1 decisions are built on.