A product’s backstory… is everything that happened to get the object or service to us, everything that will happen behind the scenes while we use it, and everything that will happen after it leaves our lives. The backstory tells us who we’re being when we make a choice.

Another difficulty in backstory communication has been the lack of clear targets. Effectively revealing your backstory conveys explicit goals about the kind of company you’re trying to be, and it is still difficult to know what the gold standard is for any particular product or service: What does a sustainable shoe look like? How does a responsible masonry supply chain operate?

Vague goals are dangerous because they’re clueless. Consumers and investors both want effectiveness, and at a time when cluelessness about sustainability equals liability, to display muddle-headed thinking is to send a message that you are not entirely worthy of their trust.

- via Alex Steffen WorldChanging.com

“Good companies are getting better at telling the backstories of the things they make. Other companies — the ones who can’t figure out how to tell their backstories, or whose backstories are shameful — are sailing into the storm. Indeed, how companies tell their backstories is the critical business communication challenge of the next decade. We’re entering an era of holistic accountability and backstory management.”
- Alex Steffen via WorldChanging.com

People are dawning to the fact that we need to be accountable for our environmental footprint and limit the resources we use to shift to a ‘one planet economy’. However all this focus on negative impacts and limits becomes a bit depressing. How can we lighten our the human load on the environment and lighten up Alex Steffen from WorldChanging.com suggests a focus on ‘handprints’, instead of thinking in terms of reducing emissions, waste, negative impact… our footprint… how can we start thinking in positives and opportunities?

Retailers are aware of the need to shift from being less bad to being good. Marks & Spencer executive Ed Williams said, “consumers increasingly want to be sure that the companies they deal with reflect their values, can be trusted to behave responsibly, are who they say they are and are the kind of organization they like to be associated with.”
- via WorldChanging.com

lighten up and have a relationship = engage in services not the burden of weights and products

“An intelligent web-based advert for hand cream, making its way around the world from network to network. As it does so, it adjusts itself to appeal to the different people and groups it meets, talking with them, learning new information to help persuade its audience to buy the product. The advert discovers from one conversation that the company producing the hand cream has provided false information about safety tests. The advert checks this new information from other sources, verifies it, and begins a new campaign of its own against the company which developed it – forcing it to mend its ways, while at the same time earning it brownie points for allowing such open source-style auditing of its activities.” p7

Julia Finch reports in the Guardian about Retail Futures

The Future of shopping: multi-storey market gardens and talking fridges

Saturday September 8, 2007

The explosion in the number of TV channels and the rise of the internet to download entertainment means store chains will have to work far harder to build, and keep, consumers’ trust. One retailer told the researchers: “We won’t be able to rely on hitting millions of people at 7.45pm on a Wednesday night with a Coronation Street advertising slot”.

The technology to use Camera phones as bar code (QR code) scanners is here and can help people to learn the backstory of the things they purchase. How does it work? You take a picture of a products bar code with your phone and then receive information from a range of websites on the backstory of the product: was it produced ethically?, what is this products carbon footprint? how long is the supply chain?, is it cheaper somewhere else?
via WorldChanging.com

In Japan shoppers, or in the words of Bruce Sterling ‘Wranglers’, are already able to analyse the history of the agricultural produce available for purchase with their phones. Thailand is also moving in this direction, but with shrimp, not vegetables. Shrimp Farmers and distributers can use RFID tags to track the shrimp – opening up the supply chain to different players. The use of RFID in this instance, rather then bar codes, means that exposure to water and temperature shifts will not ruin the code.
via nationmultimedia.com

Consumers use of mobile phones will allow them to obtain the backstory: the name and contact information of the producer, the harvesting date, shipping date, the growing region, the land where the crop is produced, the the status of agricultural chemical use and even soil composition.

This has been happening in Japan since 2003. Mobile phones from NTT DoCoMo (the biggest mobile phone carrier in Japan) that feature the bar code reading device can link directly to information. In other words people can visit their local store, snap a picture and then immediately find out the products backstory via their phones while standing in the store. In Japan the JA Ibaraki Prefecture Central Union of Agricultural Cooperative makes information available on a website for consumers with NTT DoCoMo phones to link to.

“Open source QR codes by Denso Wave are the most common source for these information widgets in Japan. A survey by Market Researcher Infoplant of nearly 10,000 i-mode users in February of this year revealed 53.8 percent had used their phones to access QR code sites (.PDF in Japanese only) and a separate Infoplant survey tagged a 90 percent recognition of the QR code symbol.”

– Gail Nakada via wirelesswatch

Phones need to be able to look at a wide variety of sources to demonstrate what is at the <3 of the product. There are already malleable information archives run by activists that link to product tags – The Corporate Fallout Detector and Visible Food Project.

Mobile phones + scanning software + backstories creates vast opportunities for Enterprise:

“They could use the services to push out recommendations based on what users have scanned.”

“you can aggregate a lot of different information from different sources just by scanning something. You can do that on your own or at a desktop computer, but then you have to look up a bunch of sources and go looking for all the individual sites and so on.”

- Macromedia software engineer Sean Neville via Wired.com.

The backstory of a consumable object shifts consumption into the gears of service, not products. Players can see the links, the supply chain, the effort involved in getting produce to the point of purchase. They can personally continue the trajectory of this consumable after taking it home by layering their own stories, recipes and memories over this object.

Not brands by <3 networks and service/story providers