False Advertising or Lack of Consumer Intelligence?
You may not realize it or even think about it very much, but a lot of advertising is based on consumer intelligence levels. Marketers will say that one of advertising’s main goals is to educate the consumer about a product. The end goal, however, is obviously to sell a product.
Technology products need to be handled differently. They require a different form of advertising. Because tech products are always changing (and because they are still relatively new), many customers do not fully understand what the product does, can do, or even what the product actually is.
What got me on to this topic was a discussion of internet speeds. A friend of mine is going to be getting Verizon FiOS soon. When looking at plans, many people see “25 Mbps” and get very excited. I’ve seen it before: Someone sees a relatively large number like 25 with “Mbps” after it and assumes they will be able to download half the internet in about a minute. What many people do not understand is that there is a difference between “25 Mbps” and “25 MBps”. The difference is that one capital “B”. It’s the difference between megabits and megabytes.
It’s actually pretty sneaky. In a marketing sense, it’s genius. A potential customer is likely to skim over that detail while reading about a product. Personally, I find it to be useless. As one who understands the difference between the two terms, I’d much rather see an actual transfer speed in megabytes per second while considering a new internet plan. It was actually quite tough to figure out what kind of download speeds a 15/5 Mbps Verizon FiOS plan would offer.
In fact, I couldn’t find the information anywhere on Verizon’s website. I had to sit in an online chat with three people (they transferred me twice) to get the information. While I was waiting I did some math and found out on my own. Using Speakeasy’s Speed Test (SpeedTest.net is great, but doesn’t give speeds in MB/s) which gave me my current plan speeds of 3 Mbps or 3000 Kb/s and then my download speeds of 350 KB/s. I divided 350 KB/s by 3000 Kb/s, got .1167, and multiplied that by the FiOS speeds of 15000 Kbps. That came out to 1750 KB/s, or ~1.7 MB/s.
About 10 minutes later, Verizon confirmed that.
It’s a pain in the neck and you shouldn’t have to do it, but be sure to read very carefully into any complicated products you may be considering purchasing.
