Services thinking: improving on things
To Adam 
IMHO one of the flaws of the global warming or (the much better) Atmospheric Cancer debate is that it has been framed almost entirely on what we must stop doing, what we must stop consuming, what we can no longer enjoy. As any parent will know, this is a poor way to actually create the behaviour change you desire. Instead, it often ends up making your child want to do whatever it is you don’t want them to do more. Typically, the better option is to distract your child with something else, something that happens to be even better than the thing you don’t want them playing with at the time.
Because I continue to believe that replacing our things with services will be a part of the solution to our environmental problem, I think the same is true for the kinds of services that we’ll need. They can’t be poor representations of things; they’ll have to be better than things. they’ll have to make us feel happy about leaving our things behind because we’re getting something better.
There’s no doubt that things are bound to our society and sense of meaning, and that we have developed complex codes of intrinsic and extrinsic value around our things. However, I’m not sure that’s always a good thing. It’s a structure that’s led to a lot of the greed and overconsumption that has us where we are today. And so while we may have to sacrifice a bit of symbology and such in moving from things to services, I’m of the opinion that this makes it even more sensible to do.
However, I don’t think that it’s all sacrifice, what services lack as symbols, they more than make up for in ability. Because services aren’t physical things, they can do stuff that physical things never could. We are giving up CDs in droves because music as a service from iTunes and Napster are delivering a better experience than owning CDs ever could. We aren’t moving away from CDs because the environmental impact of manufacturing, distributing and disposing of CDs is horrendous. That is just a bonus, the real benefit of course is the access to a greater library of music than we could possibly ever afford or find room for, in a better, more searchable form.
Services can transform categories; obviously we believe that’s also true for marketing (as a service). However the lesson from the music industry is one that I think about a lot. The transformation of the music industry happened to the industry, it was done by outsiders. And while the music industry grappled with the problems of selling and protecting things, their lunch was eaten by people who had little respect for the things of music but lots of respect for the experience of music.
