Measurement at the end.
If we can’t measure, we can’t improve.
How will consumers improve their impact without knowing how well they are doing? Measuring impact and identity will become one of the biggest consumer experience issues of the next decade.
Measurement at on-boarding and usage tends to be an easy, motivating, customer centric experience. Often originating from a single origin – the provider. Think loyalty cards, ‘likes’ on social media, time in game, or air miles.
Measurement at the end tends to be a difficult and personal undertaking. Often navigating scientific data like CO2, Carbon tonnage and plastic types in recycling PET, HDPE. In digital it is complicated legal jargon like GDPR, cookies, or technical terms. The information is from multiple origins. It is an adventure to just get a clear answer. If you have ever tried to calculate your carbon footprint over a month you know what I am talking about. Aligning numbers from your heating, travel, and food is a tangle of data and sources.
Commercial and state actors
Further to this, the groups and systems that measure behaviour in the consumer lifecycle reinforce this division between beginning and end. The groups that manage the beginning are deep, advanced and incredibly successful - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Wallmart, banks, marketing companies. With a currency of clicks, they are focused on pushing the consumer to more consumption with deep routed techniques like advertising, cookies, demographics, purchasing history and other methods of surveillance capitalism.
The actor at the end of consumerism is the state. Trying to stop the long term consequences of consumption. In health it says ‘don’t drink too much’, ‘stop smoking’ or ‘avoid heart disease’. In waste it is, ‘don’t recycle this’ or ‘dispose in appropriate place’. Methods the state use seem simplistic, often resorting to shaming or fining people in to compliance. The approach talks to the individual as a citizen. But the individual does the damage as a consumer. So it is hard to attach a measurement when the data and behaviour is elsewhere.
We need a better measure
At the end of the consumer lifecycle, people need a simple means of measurement to communicate the outcome of the engagement. This can help assess impact, set responsible limits and navigate how to neutralise. We need a measuring mechanism that can be applied across digital, service and product sectors and has a simple and flexible unit of measurement.
