As you may well know, Fairphone is a company that originally arose from a kickstarter campaign and makes phones that are as easily repairable, as sustainable and as fairly sourced as possible. They do have their issues, but compared to other big phone companies they’ve done a great job with this.

Now it appears that Fairphone is due to announce the so called ‘Fairphone Keep Club’ on the 14th of September - a bonus program as we all know it. You buy stuff, you get points for what you buy, and when you’ve got enough points you can redeem them to buy more stuff.

The keep club website claims that it’s the only rewards program that gives back to those who keep their Fairphones as long as possible, but judging by the listed ‘challenges’ it appears that the most efficient way to gain points is to simply buy new stuff.

Personally I’m a bit torn on this, due to the idealistic viewpoints I tend to judge Fairphone under in accordance with their stated sustainability goals. I do realize that is a much higher standard than the big-players in the phone industry achieve. I also get that Fairphone wants to build its brand identity and create incentives to keep customers and sell their products. But at the same time I can’t help but think that in the end that program is an incentive to be less sustainable, as it ultimately provides you with those fancy points as a psychological incentive to buy the newest and latest Fairphone product.

So I wanted to bring this topic into a wider community that may not currently be as deep in the Fairphone bubble: Do you think such bonus programs will rather help spread the idea of a more repairable, sustainable approach to phones, or will it rather serve as an incentive to artificially shorten a phone’s lifecycle by prematurely buying a new one? And more generally speking: Do you think advertising strategies rooted in consumerism and classic capitalistic company goals are compatible with sustainable product lifecycles somehow, despite not exactly having aligned interests?

  • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think you’re overthinking this.

    Right now, Fairphone’s major challenge is increasing market share.

    I don’t know if this will help, but I don’t have a better idea. I do think it’s useful to look at cars to see how it can work.

    The major auto companies only started taking EV’s seriously because consumers and governments created an opportunity that Tesla took. Once consumers were choosing Tesla instead of Audi or Lexus, it forced Volkswagen and Toyota to start taking the competition seriously.

    I think the same should happen with consumer electronics. Standardization, repairability and long life need to be incentivized in a much stronger way than they are now.

    Once those incentives are there, Fairphone will be able to take advantage and then Samsung, Google and Apple will be forced to follow.