Loyalty programmes have been given a boost by location-based services and social media. Companies like Groupon can use twitter and the like to pump out masses of offers to huge groups, taking advantage of ridiculously fast scaling to become HUGE. Location-based applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and the rest have created a bridge between peoples movement, their custom and the chance to personalise services, deals and offers based on their habits and a GPS signal. Real-time, customised retailing is not that far away (shudder).
This is all great if a) you have a smartphone, b) you feel it’s worth it letting people know where you are 24/7 and c), all you do is shop.
Think of the centre of a city and its shopping district. From Oxford Street to smaller high streets and shopping centres they are almost universally grim. The stock story goes that the combined forces of the internet and the recession have made high street retail more and more costly. The only way to win is to squeeze prices. So we have 3 quid jeans and two pence t-shirts. High volume retail is the only route left.
Collaborative consumption has a huge role to play in shifting attitudes to owning more ‘stuff’ and showing up those who talk about sustainable consumption and shifting more units in the same breath.
Corporate efforts so far have mainly dealt with work around reducing waste, reducing resource use in production, raising labour standards, promoting certification standards and adding socioeconomic benefits to products and services. All good but, at its heart sustainable consumption must mean buy/use less stuff.
Before the internet went social and we still lived in an age of push, companies that wanted to engage with big issues through their CR programme would pump out mega treatises on their approach to dealing with their social, economic and environmental issues.
There is no contest in a footrace between a well-oiled, just-in-time-schooled car maker, looking to shift as many units as possible in a new market, and a decision-by-committee megacity administration trying to put in place an urban infrastructure fit for the 21st century. Handily, the auto maker also gets to socialise the losses (more gridlocked roads, fuel dependency, air pollution, deterioration of public space etc) and move on.
Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you’re really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Please leave me. Please just leave me here to die. (C Brooker)
The above clip from Futurama and the article by Charlie Brooker in today’s Guardian, add a dimension to the e-waste/toxic mineral/assembly line debate which I think points to a smarter future for the consumer electronics industry. If you add together conflict minerals, e-waste, toxic chemicals used in production, and the now well-documented unrest among Chinese assembly line workers, the satisfaction footprint of our gadgets is miniscule.
Off to see Clay Shirky talk tonight about his new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Lots of ideas about human potential in the 21st Century and living in a world that is moving to being less about consuming and more about doing.
I’ll be intrigued to find out how far down this road he thinks we are. Does the Foxxcon assembly line worker in Shenzen or the Mcjobber in the suburbs of Sao Paulo get to be part of this creative rebalancing? Or are they just allowed to be the last targets for growth hungry legacy companies of the 20th Century and an easily forgotten part of our own personal supply chains?
This is a short research note prepared for a conference in Mozambique. It explores post-crisis opportunity in really going for a water tight approach to sustainability across the board in tourism development.
It seems that the kind of rebalancing that we will see is going to be political rather than the consensual economic kind favoured by developed nations.
‘The more imminent risk, though, surely is ultra-easy policy in the US, eurozone, UK and Japan helps to fuel asset price bubbles in emerging market such as China, Brazil and India – and small industrialised economies that largely escaped the crisis such as Australia.’
