Making decisions for your customers

This week, I’m riffing on some news.

Both Microsoft and IKEA announced plans to be carbon neutral by 2030.

And once that’s done, they plan to kick it up a notch:

• Microsoft wants to remove all historical carbon by 2050.
• IKEA wants to be climate positive from that point on.

These big statements by big companies aren’t anything new.

What’s interesting are the details. These appear to be more than lip-service. Both linked articles actually go quiet in-depth into how the two companies plan to realize these gains.

Here are two points that grabbed my attention and caused me to think a bit further.

Upstream wins

For Microsoft, most of its footprint is upstream. It’s putting together the software and associated efforts of keeping it running.

Their customers aren’t exposed to most of those (Getting their employees to commute by bike or car) so they are the only ones that can take action on it.

But for others, they can offer the choice to their customers. (Whether customers on their cloud hosting platform want to use green energy or not).

This led me to the thought:

? What’s more effective: making the change yourself or exposing your customers to that change?

Downstream wins

Similar to Microsoft, a lot of the gains for IKEA are upstream: Sourcing materials, energy use during production, energy production.

But because they deal with physical products, there is also an impact from customers coming to the stores, powering their devices at home and later, recycling those same products.

One interesting comment in the article, mentions a shift that needs to happen amongst IKEA customers.

“Once they’ve sold the product and it’s sitting in someone’s home, how do you make sure that the product comes back to Ikea to be renewed, restored, or recycled after its first use?” says Mark Griffiths, WWF

I’d be really interested to see what measures IKEA takes to enable this kind of thinking with the majority of its customers.

The current perception of IKEA products isn’t one of durability.

If I buy a sofa today, I don’t expect it to last forever. More like 5, maybe 10 years.

So what happens afterward?

If IKEA is deliberately engineering a product’s afterlife, do I need to take it back to IKEA? Do they pick them up?

Does it get re-used/furbished as a sofa? Or is it broken down into its components, which turn into different products?

How how can they convince me it’s worth the hassle?