From cars to music, houses to handbags, growing numbers of people no longer aspire to own. Belongings that used to be the standard for measuring personal success, status and security are increasingly being borrowed, traded, or simply left on the shelf. In the last 5 years, we’ve seen massive growth in new business models in which people are willing to tradeoff the right to own a product, in the fullest sense of that term (indefinite access, right to transfer, etc.), for new kinds of social capital. Indeed the integration of social capital with commodity work has been noted as an important new mutation in the private sector. New businesses are spawning to help people make use of products that otherwise sit underutilized including the spare bedroom, the snow blower, the ladder or extra bike. These new businesses span vertical industries and appeal to audiences at a range of socioeconomic levels.
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OVERVIEW
Relationships between people and products are central to the EPIC community. The last two decades of design ethnography have focused on the product experience to make contextual recommendations on how products might be positioned, designed, and made available. Yet, underlying this focus are two assumptions. First, that when people really want something, they buy it. Second, that people buy products to keep and own them. Ethnography in industry has less frequently asked how people lose interest in products they own, what they do with them when they lose interest or symbolic value such as pride or status, or what people’s relationship is to products they don’t desire to own.
Our hypothesis for a recent project, Changing Models of Ownership, was that owning products is becoming less valuable to people and that the nature of ownership is changing. This raised several interesting questions for us as a consultancy primarily concerned with creating new forms of value for our clients. So last year Claro Partners, in collaboration with Hakuhodo Innovation Lab, conducted a project to examine how people are rethinking their relationships to products and to discover the new types of value exchange they participate in with businesses and each other. Additionally, we sought to explore the ways in which new businesses are already operating within these shifting ideas of ownership.
In this paper we share some of the key research insights from the project and discuss why emerging business models are able to provide new forms of value to people. We will conclude with some reflections on how these insights into new models of ownership and value exchange feed directly back into the ethnographic practice. We will discuss how we used some of our insight to frame our own work, shape our interactions with both clients and participants, and define our own value as a strategic consultancy.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Claro and Hakuhodo invited companies to participate in this project with us, and ultimately created a consortium of five client companies across telecom, consumer electronics, mobile devices, public infrastructure, and computer technologies. Consortium members helped frame and interpret the topic, influenced the shape and emphasis of the approach and outcomes, and joined us in fieldwork globally.
To gather fresh insight on this topic, we conducted 55 ethnographic interviews/observations and site visits in Shanghai, Chengdu, Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangalore, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Sao Paulo, and San Francisco. Our participants had a range of backgrounds and experiences that shed light on the topic of ownership. We talked with an anarchist squatter and online buyer and reseller of Betty Boop collectables in Spain, the best Ultra Man bootlegger in China, a second-hand auto dealers and a newly rich housewife in India, co-housing adherents and illegal content downloaders in California, practitioners of minimal living and a community of back-to-the-landers outside of Tokyo, open source evangelists and an online nail polish maven in Sao Paulo.
This ethnography was situated within the broader context of 35 stakeholder interviews within the consortium client companies each of whom had specific concerns about the questions of ownership, as well as 17 interviews with domain experts, and extensive secondary research. Among the experts we spoke with were Nick Noles, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan; Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Manager at Profile Books; Nishant Shah, Director of research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society; Neal Gorenflo, Founder & publisher of Shareable.net; Rachel Botsman, Author of “What’s mine is (y)ours”, and Gene Yoon, Founder, Bynamite.com.
PRIOR WORK
There is obviously a broad and deep body of prior work that is related to the topic of this study. Sharing has been looked at intimately by people such as Russell Belk and Markus Giesler, as has borrowing by Melody Roberts. On topics such as free software and its relation to a counterculture, the work of Chistopher Kelty and Fred Turner comes to mind. And Stewart Brand’s focus on utopia, the commons as a means of managing limited resources, and radical class and status politics take concepts of sharing and post-consumerism to potentially far-reaching conclusions. But visions of a new tomorrow, ethical and altruistic motivations are outside our scope of study; we were focused on the economic decisions people make when changing from a traditional form of value exchange to something untried and unfamiliar. The work of Pierre Bourdieu and Amy Hanser’s on status and class are of a different direction than our own except as we all broadly understand that status is an aspiration of ownership in many instances. Our project started with a much more mechanistic and applied approach than many of the researchers and their work cited above. Even concepts such as product dominant logic, service dominant logic, and product service systems are focused more on the concept of “value in use” perspectives, whereas our own focus was more directed to “value through exchange.” And while the work of service design firms like Live|Work strive for equity in the service design with which we heartily agree, in our practice we are more interested in the elements that must be in place to develop better business models for our clients to meet the underlying needs of people we refer to as “post consumers.”
WHY OWNERSHIP?
We chose to look at ownership and value exchange as an important lens on human-object and consumer-company relationships because we observed certain trends that together began to suggest a fundamental shift in cultural meanings of ownership:
- A weariness of hyper-consumption, especially in developed economies
- An overabundance of choice, leading to the desire for more meaningful experiences, and decreasing opportunities for product differentiation
- Digital technologies enabling consumers to do things more quickly and independently, eliminating the need for extra products or services
- More considered choices in an environment of economic decline
- New indicators of status and new symbols of value not based in material goods
An initial review of evidence, such as personal curation services (like media recommendation engines or TweetDeck that are replacing traditional news sources), shared access networks like Spotify, P2P networks like RelayRides and minimalist aesthetic moments in US, EU, and Japan led us to hypothesize that ownership is indeed already changing. It also raised several questions for further research: How are these changes manifesting across various types of products and services, geographies, and cultures? How are people reevaluating what they need and want? How will P2P and sharing practice affect the mass market? What are the successful business models in this shifting environment of ownership? If ownership is not part of the exchange what other types of value are being exchanged?