Has your product ‘jumped the shark’?

Product leaders are easily persuaded that their product is the best. I worked in a big corporate company who kept polishing the old operating system. Despite it never matching new competitor products entering the market. They just couldn’t end its life.

‘Jumping the shark’ is a term describing a TV show that has past its best. The term comes from an episode of the very successful Happy Days, where a scene depicts Fonzy, a protagonist in the show, jumping a shark on water skis. The show was never considered as good after this the 3rd episode in the 5th season.

The phrase was coined by Jon Hein, a radio personality. Who in 1997 created a website called jumpTheShark.com, that aimed to define when a TV show had past its best. The website was sold in 2006 for $1million dollars. The URL now points to TVguide.com in its own little jump the shark irony. ⁠1Another layer of irony, is mocking the website that would have been a really useful resource to write this post.

In mid-2004, Friends, one of TV’s most successful ever shows, ran for the last time after two hundred episodes. It had become so expensive that the network felt it couldn’t justify paying for more, also some of the actors, writers, and staff involved were keen to move on. Everyone who worked on the show was emotionally prepared for an ending. This bled through into the final episode, leaving viewers feeling things were not resolved at all well, with poorly-crafted knee jerk conclusions to stories. It had ‘jumped the shark’ because no one could bear to put it out of its misery.

More recently, Curb Your Enthusiasm ended⁠2 after 120 episodes. Apparently it has tried to die on a few occasions before, but been resuscitated. This time though the end was a good one. At least according to the Guardian review “Curb Your Enthusiasm finale review – an absolutely perfect ending”

How the end comes…

Businesses sometimes ignore the inevitable end of their outdated offering. Peter Drucker, the famous business writer and acknowledged founder of business consultancy, describes how many businesses fail to see the coming end. He lays out this theory in three parts.

• First, there are assumptions about the environment of the organisation: society and its structure, the market, the customer, and technology.

• Second, there are assumptions about the specific mission of the organisation.

• Third, there are assumptions about the core competencies needed to accomplish the organisation’s mission.

One of those approaches he calls abandonment.

Systematic abandonment

“Every three years, an organisation should challenge every product, every service, every policy, every distribution channel with the question; If we were not in it already, would we be going into it now? By questioning accepted policies and routines, the organisation forces itself to think about its theory. It forces itself to test assumptions. It forces itself to ask: why didn’t this work, even though it looked so promising when we went into it five years ago? Is it because we made a mistake? Is it because we did the wrong thing? Or is it because the right things didn’t work?”

Certainly the big company I worked for didn’t have these conversations. Many of the senior management had emotional ties with the OS that meant they couldn’t do the impartial analysis that Drucker endorses.

Endings are often very emotional. Either the potential of an end happening or the process of its transition. Frequent discussion of the end of a product is healthy for a company and its product development team. Without theses discussions endings become an enormous burden when they need to be delivered.

The best approach is talking about the end, often and seriously.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark

2 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/apr/08/curb-your-enthusiasm-finale-review-an-absolutely-perfect-ending?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Drones. The quickest product endings?

Buy drone ✔️
Fly drone ✔️
Crash drone ✔️
Trash drone ✔️

Walking through my building, and seeing a brand new drone box with a broken drone inside made me think about the consumer experience of these products. Broken quick enough to put it straight back in the packaging you only just unwrapped it from. Is it the quickest ending for a product?

Consumer drones fall in to a wider e-waste. The sort of waste that is hard to define as a consumer experience. Where people know their TV, Vacuum cleaner or computer is e-waste, but maybe not the smaller things like toys they got for their kids, the vape they use, or the drone they just bought and crashed.

A UNITAR (United Nations Institute for Training and Research) and WEEE Forum study “found that of the 74 average total e-products in a household, 13 were hoarded (nine unused but working, four broken).”⁠1 According to the WEEE Forum, “some 7.3 billion individual items discarded annually, an average of about 1 e-toy for every man, woman and child on Earth.”⁠2

Consumer drones fit neatly in to this category. Their short life span means they show up as a piece of broken e-waste pretty quickly. According to a joint Business Insider and News24 South Africa article 10% of drones are destroyed on the first flight.⁠3 The majority are due to simple pilot error. A regional drone repair service in South Africa called Fixology had 1200 drone repairs booked in the first 8 months of 2019.

To help with first time crashing of drones, some helpful companies have started to make flight simulators ⁠4for budding drone pilots. Helping people learn the controls before terminating the product.

Consumer experience

Lots of the products that fall in to the invisible e-waste category, including drones have rich, engaging and emotional stories to purchase them. Drones characterise this well. For many social media influences the possibility of create some magically compelling content with aerial shots is too much to avoid. It also means spending money on an emerging field of technology, which excites many consumer hearts.

Ending types and drones

Reflecting on this, we can image a Venn diagram that places other products alongside drones, that have similar desires from consumers.

Drones fill this sweet spot of consumer desire and destruction that few other disposable products do. But what is different about the high turn over with other products, is that other have an Exhaustion/Credit Out ending. Where the drone ends as part of the onboarding failure with a Broken/Withdrawal type of ending.

Its ending is quick, explosive, exciting and expensive. It is not under control, and often detached from the producer of the product, so the potential of instructed disposal of the material waste is often unavailable. So on many occasions these products sit in product purgatory, waiting for clear next steps. Like the drone in my building.

1 https://techhq.com/2023/10/how-do-you-dispose-of-invisible-e-waste-international-e-waste-day/#:~:text=LED%2Dpowered%2C%20extra%20high%20visibility,to%20overlook%20its%20recyclable%20potential.”

2 https://weee-forum.org/ws_news/invisible-e-waste-almost-10-billion-in-essential-raw-materials-recoverable-in-worlds-annual-mountain-of-electronic-toys-cables-vapes-more/

3 https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/drones-crashing-in-south-africa-first-time-out-without-insurance-2019-9

4 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.makkuzu.simudrone&hl=en_US

The 5rs, and why altruism is no match for marketing.

The 5 r’s (reuse, reduce, recycle, repurpose, and refuse) (or most variants of r’s) requires amazing altruistic behaviour of the individual. Which is the same individual that has been doing the heavy lifting of previous issues. Who might cycle instead of drive. Train instead of fly. Eats plant protein instead of meat protein. These people are in a concerned minority of well meaning individuals who are doing the best they can for the environment and society. They should be celebrated and we should aspire to follow their lead. 

In contrast, we have consumer behaviour. Synthesised by industry over decades, even centuries. Using powerful psychological traits to trigger our selfish interests. It promotes and celebrates individual gain that satisfies short term wants. Consumers are lured by advertising that says “You deserve it”. 

The majority of people fall in to this consumer category. They buy a product because it is cheap, not because it is circular. People who are buying chicken not because it is organic but because it is on special offer. People who buy cars based on what their peers have, not on limitations of funds or efficiency of impact. Consumer desire is a powerful, well established, incredibly popular emotional driver. It is a gigantic problem.

The psychology of these two behaviour groups has different sources. They operate on opposite problem spaces – individual desire, or the global social concern. They operate on different time spans – want it now, or plan for a better future. The reward from both activities is different – benefit of personal satisfaction, or presenting future generations with opportunities.

Don’t get me wrong, we need to do everything we can. Action like the 5rs is great. I am a big fan. Its no match for mass consumption and convenient disposal. It won’t solve the crisis we are in. For that we need new approaches. 

Bonding the impact makers

We need to push for a solution that is part of the consumer experience. Something that bonds the consumer and provider together in equal responsibility. These parties are joint benefices of the consumer transaction – the consumer who benefits as their needs are met, the provider benefits from financial reward. For too long these two groups have walked away from the debt of consumerism without obligation to correct it. That debt, be it in the form of waste plastic, or carbon gas, even lingering data assets, has unfairly impacted groups outside of the consumer / provider relationship.

What we have tended to do is separate the consumer / provider at the end. Then blame the business and request increased laws to punish companies independent of the consumer. This fixes part of the problem in terms of inspiring improved materials or manufacturing. But it overlooks the partnership as an entity. This is where bonding and responsibility needs to happen. Without doing this we are failing to attach the act of consumption as a consumer, to the impact of consumption. 

Act attached to impact

Which is where we are at with the 5rs. Consumerism is an experience of consumption. We need to deal with it in that way. It is currently experienced by a consumer as a purely selfish indulgence that they are free to walk away from. This is not fair. As consumers we should take responsibility at the end. This should be delivered as an experience by the company that created the product. That experience should be bonding. Binding the parties together to neutralise the negative consequences of consumption. 

Attaching the consumer and provider together makes the loop of impact and blame far tighter. Instead of waste falling outside of the consumer relationship in the current model and then having to be corrected by society. Waste stays attached to the consumer / provide relationship. Resolving that issue becomes a direct cost, financially as well as emotionally for the consumer. 

1.5c. So, that’s the end of that story. 💩

Climate change is one of the biggest stories in recent history. It seems the hopeful story we told ourselves has ended.

As the BBC said “For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU's climate service. World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C.”⁠1

Now, what should be said to those audiences around the world who watched in 2015. How do we communicate a mass failure? How do we tell people that the 1.5c story has ended.

Endings to stories are important. They establish important fundamentals for ourselves and wider society. Richard Neupert in his book The End, Narration and Closure in Film says that “solid closure in conventional narratives and histories satisfies individual and social desire for moral authority, a purposeful interpretation of life, and genuine stability”

In parallel, Elizabeth MacArthur in her book Extravagant Narratives calls it an “attempt to preserve the moral and social order which would be threatened by endlessly erring narratives.”

I am sure we are all feeling a sense of moral and social order being threatened because of this human made erring narrative of climate heating. But, how should the authorities that promised to keep heat below 1.5, tell us the end of this story?

Should they talk in a political style? Alluding to national initiatives, working with other countries. But that story is tired and our ears are exhausted. 😩

Should they use the communication style of science? Charts, complicated terms, carbon tonnage. Interesting, but is that the mass market language that people are going to engage in? 👽

Should they use the communication style of Hollywood. Where this 1.5 story has been ended, but also left on a cliff hanger? Another sequel coming soon…! 🤩

Should they use a pessimistic reality. Did we really trust the politicians? Did we really trust ourselves? Who can we point a finger at? Not sure that is any use. 😭

Or should we just carry on, scrolling on to another bit of news in collective denial – Taylor Swift has won this. King Charles is ill. The dollar is rising. The Dodgers won a game.

I think our collective psyche will go for the Hollywood style. We have started to hear about a new 2 degree centigrade sequel, and a future 3 degrees horror sequel. For example on the podcast The Rest is Politics, Bill Gates said “There’s no stopping us passing 2C.” He continued to explain details from that coming story “In temperate zone countries, in terms of your overall economy or livelihoods, it’s actually not a gigantic thing. Yes, you have to pay to make various changes, you have to have air conditioning.” He summarised with another potential story, although left the detail out with a classic cliff hanger horror story – “The really bad stuff is, say, you let it go above 3 degrees.”

How exciting for the climate change story franchise.

1 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68110310

A bad ending.

A business account I use auto renewals 30 days before the service period starts. They have now locked me in until 2025 without telling me. As a consumer I feel super trapped. Let’s look at this as an ending.

Firstly, I don’t blame the business. Established business thinking says ‘making it easy to leave means more people will leave’. Which sounds really moronic. BTW, there are two reasons people leave your business

1. Your product does not match their needs.

2. External personal factors.

A business has control of one of these. The other is none of the businesses, business.

The business I am enduring currently is using a Payment Before Service transaction type. If done poorly this type of transaction often leads to bad customer experience. Take the money and run type of business – think late trains and having to ask for your money back through loads of forms.

This business has gone one further and asked for payment a month before the service starts. That takes some balls. Especially in a purely digital service with no commitment to purchasing materials. They are just turning data centre accounts on.

The Ending Type this business is using is a Time Out ending. One year contract. (If you have done the Endineering course, you know experiences can end in a few types, but usually one type in dominant). Time Out endings are fine for most situations when there is transparency. (Think of holidays. If a travel business was not clear about dates it would be chaos) If you don’t contact the customer before the time period has lapsed, then that really moves it to a twisted type of Lingering ending. Where the end has happened in the background without a discussion.

How to improve it?

Firstly, make the ending far more transparent. Clearly show a reference on the site to the end date of the current contract (Time Out endings need to be clear to all parties).

• Periodically remind the consumer about the renewal.

• As the end gets closer, do this reminding with increased tempo.

• Invite conversation as the end comes closer. Help the customer navigate options at the end.

• At the same time invite flexibility about contracts. Some people want to leave. Some people won’t.

The current experience gives the impression of the business being paranoid and desperate. I don’t think it is, but trapping people in for a year, a month before that year starts is not a good look.

Make the end a place for celebration not worry. In this type of business there is a great deal of elements to package up and archive before anyone leaves. This could be a great goodbye legacy. Leaving the client with a warm nostalgia ( + embedded brand equity). The customer should not be experiencing the relief of getting out of some traumatic event.

Probably the biggest impact to any business of a bad ending is the impact on the service team. Call centres often take the brunt of bad endings. It takes a lot of admin time and therefore money. Especially if the business is paranoid about people leaving. A smooth ending helps tasks get solved. You wouldn’t make it hard anywhere else in your product flow, why do it at the end.

Lastly, I think the business I am talking about is better than this. Elsewhere, they have been great at running the service. But the ending they are currently doing is bad for business and the brand.

Christmas Product Endings

Lets look at the end of some of the most common gifts for Christmas.

Perfume.

Wine.

Jewellery.

Phones.

Headphones.

Socks.

2023 ends. What happened?

Here are some of the highlights.

The word Endineering is patented. The Endineering online course has really picked up - over 650 Endineers now. Gained some incredible new clients with Fairphone, Booking.com and Logitech. And introduced the theme of endings with talks at other great companies - Ford, Influence Tech, Synapse, General Motors, GreenBiz, Lloyds Bank, KTN Innovate UK. Hopefully the talks will inspire them to become endineers too? Podcast are picking up and becoming another common way to share to new audiences - School of Start Ups, Sustainable UX, Limeloop. Conferences seem to be picking up again after the pandemic. It was also really nice to see old friends at some of the events - IXDA Zurich, Push Conference Munich and met new people at new conferences - Circularity 23 in Seattle. I always like to share the theme of endings with younger audiences and help deliver new content for schools and universities - HSLU Switzerland, Berghs Sweden, ESC Clermont School of Management and Strate Ecole de Design Lyon, Kaos Pilots and Hyper Island.
What a great year.

Thanks to all those who helped.

Bad medical product endings

Of all the sectors in product development where you want reliability, few are more critical than the medical sector. Here the product experience needs to be solid, reliable and of course, if its going to end, it better be planned. Surprisingly even here the end is not as thought through as you might think.

The medical industry is massive, growing, and very innovative. According Statista, it is projected to reach US$570.70bn in 2023. Of which the largest market is Medical Devices with a projected market volume of US$471.80bn in 2023. And R&D in that sector in 2024 projected to be $44 billion. ⁠1The medical start-up sector is also pretty busy according to an analysis by Rock Health, ⁠2 in the first six months of 2023, U.S. digital health startups raised $6.1 billion across 244 deals, with an average deal size of $24.8 million. ⁠3

Although there is plenty of interest in starting new business, developing new products, sometimes attention is not paid to what happens if it stops. Unlike many other consumer products a bad ending in medical products can be more than an inconvenience.

Blindingly bad

Terry Byland became the first person to receive two eye implants from a start-up called Second Sight Medical products. The company had been developing a new technology, based on neural implants to provide sight to blind people. They had nearly 350 customers around the world, but, in 2019, Second Sight discontinued its retinal implants and nearly went bust the following year. Leaving its customers in limbo without any support. The systems embedded in their heads didn’t stop then, but there was no support or updates to the software.⁠4 According to an article in Spectrum.ieee.org, Second Sight didn’t inform anyone of the company’s collapse. “No letter, email, or telephone call,” said one of their patient. Even clinicians were taken by surprise by Second Sight’s collapse. “It’s not something that we talked to any of the patients about, because I don’t think it crossed any of our minds”

What a headache

Meanwhile, another innovative company at a similar time was pioneering in a different medical area. Markus Möllmann-Bohle gets cluster headaches. They are rare, but extraordinarily painful. People who get them are typically affected for life. Treatment options are very limited. For Markus the condition eventually became chronic.

One potential solution was a product by the start-up Autonomic Technologies (known as ATI) in San Francisco, California. Their device had passed a series of placebo-controlled clinical trials with flying colours. It changed Markus’s life. He was free again.

The magazine Nature ran an article about the product. They said “by the end of 2019, ATI had collapsed. The company’s closure left Markus and more than 700 other people alone with a complex implanted medical device. People using the stimulator and their physicians could no longer access the proprietary software needed to recalibrate the device and maintain its effectiveness. ⁠5

Stranded sitting

It is not just highly complex embedded medical products that are venerable. Even the simplest of potential hazards like a power cut can bring about critical endings for patients. A 2023 broadcast by local TV news company KUTV, interviewed Kent Rich who was trapped in a medical chair because it stopped working due to a power cut. He couldn’t call for help because the wifi phone he uses also stopped working. Both seem simple and expected scenarios that should have been considered, yet even here a bad ending is not planned for.⁠6

List of ended medical products

Who keeps track of these? In the US, the FDA does many of the approvals for medical products, and they also keep track of the bad endings. The Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience, or MAUDE is⁠7 a list of products that should stop being used according to the FDA. It makes interesting readying, from simple face masks, to more complex products.

Product, service or digital product endings vary in impact. Some of them show little impact on the consumer directly, yet might show up months later as litter in a far away country. Other products have a more immediate impact on the consumer. Sometimes that can be life changing.

1 https://www.statista.com/outlook/hmo/medical-technology/worldwide#global-comparison

2 https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/digital-health/digital-health-funding-settles-down-2023-fewer-deals-smaller-check-sizes

3 https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/digital-health/digital-health-funding-settles-down-2023-fewer-deals-smaller-check-sizes

4 https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

5 https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html

6 https://youtu.be/MS4eh6JGzRo

7 https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/2022-safety-communications

The American approach to consumerism. How its aged over 100 years.

It is nearly one hundred years since the pioneering home economist, author and consumer champion Christine Frederick defined the American Consumer approach. How have these ambitions aged in a world of too many products and a heating planet.

Christine Frederick published the book Selling Mrs. Consumer, in 1929. This challenged the widely held assumption of the male as the lone consumer, establishing the importance of women as informed consumers and encouraging them to buy more goods. She saw a clean break with the consumer habits of the old world Europeans and encouraged American consumers to reject the quality/longevity approach. In Frederick’s disapproving words, “In Europe people buy shoes, clothes, motor cars, etc., to last just as long possible. That is their idea of buying wisely. You buy once and of very substantial, everlasting materials and you never buy again if you can help it. It is not uncommon for English women of certain circles to wear on all formal occasions, the same evening gown for five or ten years.”⁠1

Frederick pushed for the purchase of goods on the basis of wanting the latest, newest, brightest and shiniest thing. “We have subscribed whole-heartedly to the consumer idea that goods should not be consumed up to the last ounce of their usability; but that in an industrial era Mrs. Consumer is happiest and best served if she consumes goods at the same approximate rate of change and improvement that science and art and machinery can make possible.”⁠2

She encouraged the American consumer to engage with the ‘Progressive Obsolescence’ she observed in her research into the American home. In her eyes the characteristics that most defined the American approach –

• First a suggestible state of mind, eager and willing to take hold of anything new.

• Second came an innate readiness to scrap or lay aside an article before its natural, useful life was completed in order to make way for a new and better thing.

• And third came a willingness to spend money, a very large share of one’s income, even if savings had to be cut back or even abandoned, in order to have new things and new experiences⁠.

Reading these three ambitions nearly a century later is pretty eye opening. Let’s reflect on them one by one.

“A suggestible state of mind.”

It notable that Frederick is inviting the consumer to be more open to advertising. Encouraging them to believe the product producers promises. The messages the average consumer at the time was receiving from advertising would have been less sophisticated by modern day standard. Far more trust would have been given to the produce. A hundred years later we are trying to do the opposite and close down the messages from advertising. As a consequence our modern adverts are placed in very deliberate contexts to help them be more acceptable.

“Innate readiness to scrap or lay aside an article before its natural.”

This would have been quite a hurdle to get over at the time. Many people would have prided themselves on the efficiency of using items to their maximum capability. Over the following decades we have become very comfortable at disposability. For a while embracing the trashcan as an all excepting end of product life vessel. Now at least we have some basic recycling in some regions. Requiring us to consider material types. Although many people around the world still have few options at good disposal routes.

Frederick also proposed a pace of consumption that seems familiar to any consumer electronics customer of today “…at the approximate rate of change and improvement that science and art and machinery can make possible.”

“A willingness to spend money, a very large share of one’s income, even if savings had to be cut back or even abandoned, in order to have new things and new experiences⁠.”

At the time of Frederick’s book there was no easy way to borrow money for many people. Especially women. Who were only permitted equal rights from banks in the US after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974. Previously a married women would require their husbands permission to get a loan. Banks would often refuse loans to single women. Credit cards didn’t emerge until the late 1950s.

Frederick was recommending an incredible effort and risk to consumers at the time. The ease of access to credit now seems a world away.

What is very clear from looking at Fredericks book nearly a century after its publication is how far we have come along a path that initially provided benefits many people. While indulging over the following decades, we overlooked the side effects and downplayed the damage. Initially they were small. Issues that could have been adjusted and corrected. But we championed the commerce and consumption beyond conservation. The growth in all aspects of consumerism were, we thought, critical to increase. More money, more products, more growth, more convenience. We have gone beyond course correction. How far will we continue in to course chaos?

1 Strasser. S. (1999). Waste and Want.  pp. 197

Over consumption to over donation

How Dan Browns Da Vinci Code reveals a global problem of giving away the crap in your wardrobe.

I was struck this week about benevolence turning to burden. A BBC article talked about the work of artist David Shrigley.⁠1 Who was inspired by a note at an Oxfam charity shop in Swansea, displayed amongst copies of The Da Vinci Code book by Dan Brown – “You could give us another Da Vinci code, but we would rather have your vinyl”.

From the BBC article.

The Oxfam charity shop manager at the time (2017) Phil Broadhurst said “Around that time there was one particular donation that we were getting a little more than we could use, which was The Da Vinci Code, because it was such a massive best seller and then a few years after, everyone is clearing their shelves."⁠2

Shrigley sourced 6000 copies of the book from the WRAP distribution depot in Oxfordshire, a climate action NGO. Where according to the article it was a ‘boneyard for best sellers’, where they had an unlimited supply of copies of the unwanted secondhand book. He then pulped them and turned them into versions George Orwells 1984 book. The artist framed the exercise as a sort of secret collaborative work with Dan Brown and George Orwell. With the 70th anniversary of Orwells death it marks a point where his copyright becomes public in the UK, so anyone can publish his work.

Invisible donation destinations
While consumers benevolently carry bags of cloths, books and toys to secondhand shops, they are often unaware of the onward journey of some of the items – spoiler alert, David Shrigley does not make art out of them. What is portrayed as a welcomed donation of a cool fashion T-shirt to someone in need, it is often of such poor quality material it is unsellable and therefore gets shipped to the global south, where they have little use of such terrible quality goods. It then gets burnt or dumped.

A recent investigation by Greenpeace, reveals the scale of the problem. “Only a small amount of used clothes are resold in the country where they were collected: about 10–30% in the UK and similar proportions in the US and Canada, says the report.“⁠3

The report describes how the language around these issues often obscure the negative impact. Where “textile waste is often “disguised” as second-hand clothing. The trade has been called “charity”, “recycling”, “diversion” and now many people call it “circular”, but none of these labels is accurate.”⁠4

In an ironic twist on textiles, circularity and the benevolence of well meaning people, Shrigley announced “A portion of the profits will be donated to Oxfam, who have also been paid for the hire of the venue and will receive the proceeds of specially designed tote bags merchandise.”

Seriously, tote bags? Like everyone doesn’t have loads of them in their houses and just take them to the charity shop anyway. Oh, wait. I get it. It’s “circular”.

As a consumer ending experience, charity has often been considered a good option for consumers to pass on what seems valuable. Other options seem merely disposal. But charity felt good, honourable and helpful. People felt like they had agency at the end. Now it seems this has eroded any perception of that. It further exposes what little options there are at the end in the shadow of such potent, easy consumption.

1 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67218454

2 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67218454

3 https://www.just-style.com/news/greenpeace-report-clothing-sent-to-east-africa-is-mostly-waste/?cf-view

4 https://www.just-style.com/news/greenpeace-report-clothing-sent-to-east-africa-is-mostly-waste/?cf-view

The privilege of defining waste.

The first modern disposable cup was called the Dixie Cup⁠1. It was introduced in 1908 in response to hygiene concerns of people sharing glass and metal cups at train station and school water fountains. A number of regions in the US started to ban their use and the paper disposable cup became a pioneering piece of bad endineering. It also started a blending in the needs of hygiene and disposability in consumer everyday life.

Once people enjoyed this new-found convenience, they looked for it everywhere. The introduction of new throwaway products such as paper towels, cups, straws, and the common use of commercial toilet paper sealed the trend. Companies like Kleenex emphasised to consumers how good it was to have convenience in throwing waste away. The volume of disposable products has grown ever since alongside the experience of the end being quicker, easier and less meaningful.

I was reminded of this history recently on a trip to the US with the family. At one point we stayed in a State that didn’t recycle anything. All household waste went in the same bin. It was interesting to observe our kids reaction. Who had grown up in the UK and Sweden where they have only ever experienced the decision needs of multiple recycling bins. Their new feeling of conflict was a shadow from the past. On one hand, they enjoyed a freeing of the burden of responsibility. At the same time overwhelming guilt in knowing its all going to landfill.

Privileged consumers

I was struck by this statement in Ilona Cheyne of Oxford Brookes University and Michael Purdue of University of Newcastle upon Tyne in their work around waste. “The essence of the legal definitions is that the owner does not want it; thus waste exists only where the product is not wanted.”⁠2 It captures well the ease of disposability, but it also alludes to the privilege in throwing stuff away. Removing that burden of responsibility from todays individual, to a distant, or future groups of people. Who will no-doubt curse our ease and often reckless disposability.

Decision tree

Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to blame the individual. After all they have been taught this behaviour over decades. As the consumer and provider relationship breaks apart at the end, so does the support and instruction the consumer receives from that relationship. This leaves defining waste to be done alone, uninstructed. Therefore leaving disposability wide open to interpretation. If we consider the decision tree along the consumer lifecycle we can see emotions and purpose change from desired object and functional product, to unwanted burden. Where the consumer is encouraged at earlier stages to think individually and selfishly. At later stages they are asked to think altruistically and regard ongoing value. Clearly conflicting behaviours.

Creating better endings can improve this situation. Bonding the consumer and provider relationship until the ultimate neutralisation of the product. For example setting up reverse logistics to take the product back to the producers dismantling facilities. Keeping a dialogue between the consumer and provider, to guide them through the best decision making path. Informing the consumer of consequence of landfill or recycling overseas and the damage it can do to people who process waste in countries without protection.

There are lots of opportunities to improve the consumer off-boarding experience.

Back in the box experience

For years brand and product people have been talking about out of the box experience – or in layperson terms how the customer first engages with a product. In the early 2000’s consumers and industry would swoon over the latest out of the box experience from leading businesses. We now need to be better than just starting experiences well. We need to end those same products with off-boarding experiences.

Apple was a major inspiration for many companies in the tech sector. Their customers would go from a branded flagship store experience to home and the layered reveal of the Apple items as the box is opened. Where they experience the delicate pieces of semi transparent paper reveal a gleaming new MacBook or iPhone, further box layers revealed more functional items like chargers and instructions.

The experience continued the on the iPhone or MacBook. Were a similar branded look and feel began a set-up assistant. Where the consumer could migrate their previous account, set up a new account, add credit cards or social media. This swiftly got the person going on their phone or computer. It also set up secuirty like face recognition or finger print scanning. Many of these features were complicated and took a significant amount of effort behind the scenes to establish a simple consumer experience in the foreground.

Of course, it wasn’t just Apple that presented consumers with these well thought through on-boarding experiences, any companies worth their salt in customer experience where doing a similar approach to the beginning of the consumer lifecycle.

Where are we now

Consumers are now in a different place. Desire of a coherent and memorable out of the box experience is a baseline. People are looking at a businesses green credentials alongside the product offering. Businesses respond by communicating their initiatives around the environment. Maybe they tell the consumer about how much they off-set or what materials they use.

The problem with lots of the communication around these issues don’t involve the consumer directly. These issues are outside the consumer lifecycle. For example, a consumer does not experience any off-sets. They do not understand the nuanced difference between one material and another. This limits the brand benefit from any of these types of communication. And subsequently limits the success of environmental or circular strategies.

Is industry looking at the end

Currently the off-boarding of a consumer experience is not considered a place to express a brand. It’s left in limbo for the consumer to resolve. Material issues, such as recycling are dealt with by municipal companies and governments, who define broad basics of what a consumer can do via waste and recycling management.

Digital off-boarding is even less considered. Most consumers think if they delete an app all the information is stopped. Likewise, leaving a service is interpreted as just not using it anymore. The reality is data is sold or merged with other data bases by the business. Who will push the regional legal limits on what they can do with a persons data. The consumer has little knowledge of the wider system, what rights they have or what happens to their data.

What could we do

There is an enormous opportunity to capture this space as somewhere to improve, inspire and build positive brand experiences. For example some starting points could be…

• Building off-boarding assistance would help many people learn more about data and clear up their digital footprint. I created an example of what this might be like a few years ago which you can read about here.

• Reverse logistics is a growing opportunity for many companies. Not only to lengthen the engagement with the consumer, but also to build true circularity into a business and product experience.

• Alignment with Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions requires a business to measure downstream end of product life. This will be hard to do without being involved at off-boarding of the consumer experience and having meaningful engagements with the consumer.

• Out of the box experiences need to be balanced with back in the box experiences. Here a mirror world exists of product introduction that presents the product punctuation with a branded farewell to the consumer.

• Loyalty schemes that measure and celebrate customer purchases need to help the consumer measure their consumption and together with the provider deal with the fall out of off-setting of a product.

Here industry has a landscape of opportunity to deal with next few decades and be part of creating positive endings for everyone.