If you did not see gains in worker productivity the last time your organisation subscribed to higher-speed Internet from your ISP, do not worry, you are not alone.
No one does because there are none to be had, and in fact you may be being fooled by the ISPs, scientists have claimed.
‘Incorrect notions’
“It’s true that the faster something works, the more time the consumer will save,” says a paper authored by Bart de Langhe, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Colorado, and Stefano Puntoni, a professor of marketing at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.
However “once a product is already fast, slight increases in its speed save proportionately less and less time,” according to the report.
The paper was reported in the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Journal of Marketing Research.
Consumers usually have “incorrect notions about the effect of productivity increases on how much time they will save,” the Journal says.
Already productive
The reason is that, in most cases, employees are already productive and they are not going to get much more productive as a result of an internet speed boost, the scientists think.
And while it is true that moving from a slow internet connection to a fast internet connection would show productivity gains, moving from an already fast Internet connection to a slightly faster one does not.
Willing to pay
Consumers are being bamboozled by the ISPs, the researchers say.
“Consumers are more willing to pay for an internet connection that is six seconds faster when the speed goes from 10 seconds to four seconds than when the speed goes from 16 seconds to 10 seconds,” the AMA uses as an example.
The authors studied three products along with productivity metrics. They looked at printers, internet connections, and food processors.
Time metrics were involved in some cases, such as revolutions-per-minute in the case of the food processors.
The consumers got it wrong and “overestimated the benefits of productivity increases at high-productivity levels relative to the benefits of productivity increases at low-productivity levels,” the AMA says in its article.
The printers
It was the same with printers; a printer that prints 50 pages per minute is probably not going to save you time over a printer that prints 20 pages per minute, the AMA report explained.
However, clearly either printer is faster than going to a print shop, waiting for the job to be completed, and driving back to the workplace again.
The gain is in buying the printer.
Ethics
And, now that the study has been completed, the ethical considerations involve whether consumers are misunderstanding them.
“We don’t think that marketers have been wilfully taking advantage of consumers in this regard,” Puntoni and Langhe wrote in the report. “But given the results of our study, any decision to rely on such consumer misunderstanding now becomes an ethical one.”
And might there be a slight flaw in the argument?
Well, if you have indeed been subconsciously bamboozled by your ISP and your speeds are greater than your needs, suppose you then decide to downgrade. The scientists have not figured in the time waste you will spend trying to argue the point with the ISP. And that is if you can even get to talk to the right person.
Patrick Nelson, IDG News Service
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