There’s a lot of chat about “how do we onboard everyone into #web3” and education seems to be the most favoured route – but is it though?
Invisibility is, desirability is, embedding it into daily life is.
Look at how Starbucks and McDonald’s will onboard their customer base into Web3 (it’s not really web3 but let’s stay on this thought train) without mentioning Web3. They’re tying it directly to the consumer experience but not explicitly saying anything about the “disruptive technology” or “sticking it to the man”.
Educating people means nothing, there’s no will to act after you’ve learnt something, especially if you can’t see why it impacts you in a positive way.
You make web3 a part of a daily routine without them even knowing.
We didn’t say “let’s educate people into IoT” – we gave them Amazon Alexa, smartwatches and made it cool to want a sodding connected toaster and TV. But at no stage did consumers need to learn and be educated about it, or be bribed to want it.
There was definite FOMO but it was driven by the desirability and the seamless and invisible impact on a daily basis. Everything about IoT integrated into a person’s routine without much of a step change but they bought into the perception of convenience very easily then they forgot they were part of a massive trend.
With Web3 we’re trying to convince consumers that there is a huge step change in technology without actually showing a huge step change in benefit. And so it fails to catch on.
Bored Apes are desperately saturating the market with their IP to the point it’s now having the opposite effect – nobody cares because there’s nothing behind it that makes a difference to the average person.
So, the only real way to onboard consumers into web3 is not to tell them it’s web3. The next wave of web3 consumerism isn’t in telling people “this is an NFT ticket” it’s just “this is a ticket and you get a bit more with it”.
I’ve said before that there are 30,000+ dApps all about connecting to various exchanges etc but barely anything that provides a useful daily service for someone.
Where’s the ride hailing dApp? The food delivery service dApp?
If Deliveroo went fully into Web3 they wouldn’t make a song and dance about the technology, they’d tell you how fast you’d get your food as a result and how much more equitable the payment system was for delivery drivers.
Perhaps it’s us that need the education, to learn the basics of how to talk to the audience we want to reach.