The first rule of deletion, is don’t talk about deletion. Or provide a route to do it. Especially in a convenient and transparent way. This tech culture anomaly might be ending with Apple’s new guidelines. Well they were new in January, but had to be put back to June because lots of people were surprised that they had to create an ending to their product. Doh!

Returns are good. They prove that the consumer system can return directly to sender and not become societies problem.

In contrast the lack of a clear deletion route of some apps, Hinge is excited the consumer might delete its app. What a great way to celebrate purposeful, task orientation of an app by measuring it’s success by the end of the product relationship. This approach now runs throughout the communication output of the company.

When should cookie consent end?

After every visit? After a day? A week? A year? A lifetime? A 100 years? A 1000 years? Longer? Surely not! I was really surprised…

One of the funniest and disturbingly delusional denials of an ending is the lifetime promise - a guarantee for life or a promise that something will always be free. Businesses seem worryingly comfortable making this enormous commitment. Using it flippantly despite all manner of evidence against remotely achieving it. 

Passive measuring is at best informative. It will go some way to improving business activity, but it will fail to achieve the deep behaviour shift we need to challenge climate change. The producer - consumer relationship needs to aspire to more. It needs bonding throughout an emotional consumer lifecycle. That achieves change and concludes the product end-of-life with producer - consumer collaboration. Scope 3 is a start for businesses to consider emotional consumer endings.

Amongst GDPR protective intent is a wealth of endings. It requires, expects and encourages endings to happen for consumer data. How this happens though is to be designed and delivered by service providers. Yet many providers care little about this aspect of the consumer lifecycle and overlook its importance to the brand and long term perception of a company.

Has Cambridge Analytica exposed Facebook to a metaphorical revenge porn experience? With no way to regain assets outside of their boundaries; drawing a parallel with thousands of victims around the world who have lost control of data, though a system that endlessly tells us to share, and fails to create ends.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)  states that “Consent must be clear and distinguishable from other matters and provided in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language”. This promises to be a vast improvement on the current consumer experience! A far more notable, and some would say, controversial aspect of the legislation is the expectation that it must be “as easy to withdraw consent as it is to give it”. This suggests that it provides an effective method for consumers to off-board and end their service relationship.

Businesses may panic about their data centres, customer service scripts and marketing, but quietly overlook the ending of the process. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming, but few businesses will be thinking about why a ‘proper goodbye’ matters. They should because, there are going to be a lot more consumers leaving services this year, empowered by GDPR. 

As the Black Friday narrative of “Consume More!” comes and goes again, it predictably ignites the counterpoint argument in many of us concerned about the pace of human consumption.

Reading articles along this theme, I am mixed with emotions of encouragement — that we are dealing with the problems of over consumption, and concern that we use the same tired story of guilt, bad big business and systematic failure. Its not that these arguments are wrong, its just they are not part of the consumer’s experience. The real failing is that the consumer experience is an incomplete story. And until the story has an emotional ending, this is not going to change.