Enshittification and the oppertunity it brings for creative professionals
Oh yes, you felt it, you spotted it, and it annoyed the heck out of you.
The gradual disintegration of experiences around us, often accompanied by price bumps or other forms of extortion, calculatingly creeping up on you once you have settled comfortably into the habit of using a service.
It’s enshittification. The latest trend of commercial trickery, pushed to the point where the social contract with the customer is being broken.
No matter how cool you are, if you keep being a douche, people will go elsewhere.
In this shift lies an opportunity for you, your company, and your customers. And it is exactly why I believe we need more business-savvy creative professionals in the C-suite.
These are my reflections, and why I think it's lazy shortcut and a complete lack of applied effort and ingenuity.
These are my reflections, and why I think it's lazy shortcut and a complete lack of applied effort and ingenuity.
And for our next trick
Enshittification rears its ugly head in many forms.
The popular removal of a function or service where, if you want it back, you have to pay for a larger subscription. It could simply be diluting the original experience to create the illusion of a competitive price. Or shoving ads in where they don’t belong, like when BMW recently took a beating for suddenly running Spider-Man commercials on the dashboard when owners started their cars.
My daily reminder presents itself as a button in my shipping label provider, Shipmondo, and a constant reminder to write this. I used to simply hit one button to order and print the label. Nice. Then someone got the genius idea to remove the “print” part of the task.
The button is the same, but instead of hearing my label printer purr into action and spit out a couple of labels, I get the message: “Upgrade your subscription to use this function.” So now I click a bit more, patiently download and print a PDF instead, all while enjoying a gentle stab of annoyance every time I use this provider.
Black Mirror excels at extrapolating these seemingly small things to a dark extreme, and does it brilliantly in the episode ‘Common People’ on Netflix, where a woman gets a life-saving brain implant that runs on a subscription. You can probably tell where this is going.
When you think about it, that is an insight strong enough to translate into a global trend so recognisable that Netflix gave it the budget for an entire episode. You can only appreciate the irony.
A race to the bottom
This approach to nibbling away at the value a company provides comes in many forms. From its equally braindead cousin, shrinkflation, slicing your deli meat thinner or putting fewer crisps in your bag, to introducing flashy buttons with features in your favourite apps that cost extra, and from there making it absurdly tricky to unsubscribe. Or something as simple and frustrating as shrinking the size of allowed cabin luggage so a standard carry-on suitcase won’t fit.
It is incredibly difficult to understand how this can, in anyone’s mind, be a sustainable approach to building a business. It’s not rocket science that this must come with a huge tax on customer experience and satisfaction, and ultimately churn.
The excuse I hear is: “We need competitive pricing to win the customer. It’s all consumers really care about” and “Everyone else is doing it. If we don’t, profits plummet.” Sorry, that’s a lazy excuse. If you resort to those tactics, you have essentially given up on the most fundamental aspect of running a business: providing value.
And that makes it open season on your customers for anyone willing to simply do better. Which, incredibly, in many cases isn’t much more than delivering the basics without disappointing them.
But even more importantly, it is a clear-as-day display of an absolute lack of curiosity and creativity.
Opportunity often comes disguised
At least for the companies that are ready to compete on the opposite set of values, actually giving a sh*t and wanting to build for the long run. They now carry a compass and a map for how to redesign their offering and become more competitive through empathy, curiosity, and creativity.
The architect Bjarke Ingels introduced a manifesto back in 2010 called Yes Is More. I boil it down to a simple translation: How many problems can we solve at once? Thus embracing the challenge of doing the exact opposite of the obvious. The group turned a mundane project like building a waste incineration facility into an attraction complete with a ski slope, hiking route, and rooftop café. Not only making it more pleasant to look at, but turning it into an attraction that also adds several alternative sources of income and amusement to the structure.
Another, more business-related project I worked on was for an airline, as with most cases the game was increase profits. Instead of removing comfort, we invented services and fun new ways for travellers to buy fun add-ons like; luggage services, onboard entertainment from lotto to live music, literally a long list of things that could make the journey more enjoyable, more fun. We did test flights, and the passengers loved it, but it also proved to be a significant above-base revenue stream. My favourite add-on was the inflight speak, where the cabin crew would read a message to a passanger over the speakers for the whole plane to hear, just imagine someone used it to set up a proposal to his girlfriend, for the whole plane to hear, on their way to Florence.
So next time a competitor of you our your customers removes a feature, adds another paywall, or makes something unnecessarily difficult. Take notes.
They might just be writing you a backwards-brief.
Stay creative out there!
