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Cost, Perceived Cost Affecting Usage Behaviour

The humble Biro is one of those ubiquitous products that is by and large ok to forget to return, or to put it another way - steal. Which helps explain why this Salt Lake City café has adapted the default design to extend their claim of ownership. But why is this product socially acceptable to steal? Even in a city where faith and responsibllity is pushed to the fore?

For those wanting background research my colleague Jan Blom has written extensively on what motivates people to personalise objects e.g. here he's also got good material in the pipeline which I'll link to in due course.

For a start the pen is mass produced, ubiquitous, changes hands as part of a task process (signing a credit card slip), and typically can be replaced for very low cost. Last week I chatted with guys from our LA design studio (cheers RN, AG & DB) and have since been mulling over the extent to which the in-store sticker cost is associated with the perceived value of the product.

Lets take a real world example from the advertising in the photo below- is it really possible for a Wal-Mart to make a profit or at least break even on a Motorola c139 mobile phone at less than $15? This isn't just about loss-leading. Despite its tangible presence the product in this advertisement isn’t the phone - the product is connectivity, and that’s where for Tracfone and by association for Wal-Mart where the promise of future profits lie. Of course this is nothing new - operators the world over take a hit on the device and make it back over the course of the contract with devices that best support services offering up the largest sticker subsidy.

But the gulf between sticker cost and actual cost hides something deeper than a lighter wallet. Like the humble biro it changes our perception of what it means to 'own' a product and may well have significant impact on the speed at which the product ends up reaching the end of its life as a functional object, of being discarded. With an estimated 1.2 billion mobile phones being sold next year this is a non-trivial matter. Transparency plays an important role in helping individuals understand their environmental impact (which is why I like the Kill a Watt that came in the TED gift bag). To what extent could or should the price of objects be transparent?

Writing from Tokyo | March 15, 2007 | Permalink