This last week Barcelona has hosted the Mobile World Congress. This is an annual event that gathers different companies and stakeholders related with the mobile industry. Every year, new phones and accessories are presented with the latest technology and gadgets in the world. This year, more than 94,000 people have attended to the Congress.
Companies launch new types of phone every year. The problem is that, even if the ones they have are working perfectly fine, people buy the newest model just to fit in and be in fashion. However, is everyone involved in this lucrative industry aware of the big issue behind it? This high consuming process has some implications that people do not know or do not want to know. For example, the waste they create or the human labour exploitation in the mining process. We must have in mind that giving money to some companies we are contributing to some practices, as the Coltan mining in Congo were many men work in almost slavery conditions to make a living. And this is only one of all the issues regarding the phone industry.
Even all these facts, I am not against mobile phones. I believe they are a great tool of communication and they have done a lot of improvement for the society. However, I think there are some aspects that need to change in this industry. Here is where companies like Fairphone appear. This social enterprise creates value by making a positive impact through all the supply chain, from mining, design and manufacturing of the product. As we said in class, it is a product that works – it has to be competitive with other products in the market – but also care about ethical values. I believe that this company looks beyond current needs and and are designing a product prepared for the future. As time goes by, more and more people are being concern about how products are made, under what conditions or what is their environmental impact. I believe that Fairphone is doing an extremely good job by changing some aspects of the industry and making others realize about what do we actually buy when we are buying a phone.
Extract of a documentary of mining in Congo. It is in Spanish, but is very recommendable. The images talk by themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofZQ4ZRy-1I
Articles:
https://www.mobileworldcongress.com/what-to-expect/what-is-mwc/
http://news.yahoo.com/dark-side-worlds-lucrative-mobile-phone-industry-111821184.html
You bring up a key part of denationalization, people do not (or do not want) to follow the chain that connect directly to consumption. In psychology there is a term called enframing (Link A). It captures the way people depersonalize the natural world and other people into sets objects with specific inputs and outputs. It creates a kind of death by spreadsheet and delinks chains of existence and being by creating psychological distance from the events on the ground. Depersonalization helps describe the Milgram experiment (Link B).
However as marketers we can communicate with people to get them to become more aware and potentially change their behavior such as how scientists in Stanford used VR and haptic feedback to give a realistic treecutting experience. The people who did this had a makred reduction in paper use.
Link A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br1sGrA7XTU&nohtml5=False
Link B
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr5cjyokVUs&nohtml5=False
Link C
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T9kfbcRrQ8&nohtml5=False
*depersonalization