Marketing ICTs - the hard sell

A lady came knocking on my door this afternoon.  She was a sales representative for Deutsche Telekom and was bravely trying to recover customers that had gone for rival companies (Alice, Vodafone, O2 and suchlike).  She politely enquired how much my monthly phone bill was and when I told her, she had to admit that, yes, I did have a point in defecting from the mighty DT.

In reality, I rarely use my landline phone to make calls.  It's infinitely cheaper for family members to communicate with mobiles (and cards, not contracts); even more so when we all belong to the same company.  As for long distance and overseas calls, there is, thankfully, Skype.  Who in his right mind would use a landline today to telephone abroad?  Not surprisingly, international Skype calls were three times as many as landline calls in 2010.  Besides that, there are so many mobile companies offering landline connections with internet, mobile telephony, television, etc. that it really is a buyer's market and it pays to shop around.  Virtually everyone nowadays has a telephone of one sort or another, which means the companies are chasing after smaller and smaller pieces of a diminishing pie.  So the nice lady from Telekom with her heavy bag of leaflets and tariffs was sadly wasting her time with me.


This set me thinking about how companies at the turn of the century went about attracting new customers.  They didn't have the benefit of huge billboards, television or radio commercials to spread the word to a wide audience.  I'm not sure how early the first ads would have been placed in newspapers, journals and magazines - some of the people who read and could afford these publications may have been able to afford a telephone connection too.  But would they have found a need for a connection that justified the cost?

Companies that offered telephone services in the first decades weren't really sure what people could actually do with a telephone.  The obvious answer (one-to-one communication or 'mere' chatting) wasn't as obvious to the late Victorians as it is to us.  Hence, we are amused by the quaint reports of concerts broadcast over the telephone, or church services, or distribution of news and information.  I think the mistake here is that they conceived of the telephone network as something for public, i.e. mass, benefit rather than a private medium.  What happened to make them realise they were going in the wrong direction?  What made people think the telephone was a suitable medium for public entertainment and dissemination of news?  How did the telephone companies, and later the General Post Office, come to 'discover sociability' (in the words of Claude Fischer)?  


It will be interesting to find out how the GPO sold new connections and if, indeed, they had a tangible marketing campaign to attract new subscribers.

• which type of customer did they have in mind (gender, social class, occupation, type of residence, location)?
• which reasons would they cite to a potential customer for needing a telephone?
• what benefits could the GPO, as a company, offer the customer?
• how did the GPO position itself against its competitors (telegraph, post, messengers)?

I predict a prodigious amount of research ahead of me!

Thrift, Part II

Continuing Thrift's point about the stubborn persistence of technological determinism in accounts, such accounts rarely placed these technologies within a framework of linked social practices (other connected technologies and humans).  Instead they would be looked at in isolation.

Accounts need to remember that technologies belong to a history of social practices.  As such, we cannot separate the technology from the practices.

Technology - consumption - culture

Telephone (as one example of a communications technology) is an artefact.

Artefacts can be used to construct our identity.

Telephone is ambivalent, double-sided since it

1. isolates us [we communicate without needing to be physically present]
2. connects us [we communicate with others where it would be impossible for us to be physically present]

Technology is no longer associated with the idea of human progress (first promoted during the Enlightenment).  Technology has not been the panacea we imagined it to be (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, global warming, pollution, etc.)

The effects that a tech has are not built into it; the effects of a tech are determined by how it is consumed and consumption needs a context.

The home as a context for consumption of tech

* The home has gone from being a unit of production to a unit of consumption (unless you are a woman, in which case it is both).

* More leisure time is spent at home.

* Home has become self-sufficient, self-contained - a process of privatization has occurred

* More emphasis on consumption, less on public sphere/community

* Again, the ambivalence of techs that bring us closer together but also isolate us from each other.

Definition of "technology"

Techs are made up of three components:

1. Physical artefact
2. Surrounding human activity - necessary, otherwise artefact on its own is useless
3. Human knowledge (know-how) - applied to the design, maintenance, etc.

In other words, tech is a social phenomenon.

Technology can be:

1. a physical artefact; or
2. a technique, a way of doing something (with or without artefacts)

Technological Determinism

The prevailing technology determines our culture, e.g. steam to power factories during steam age determines dominant form of social organisation (cotton mills, urban slums, etc.)

This theory believes that tech develops outside of society with a life of its own, and then have an impact on society [as if society were a passive recipient].

Although tech. determinism as a theory has its flaws and is now overlooked by academics, it still has a persistent hold over us.  We still talk as if we were powerless beings at the mercy of our machines, e.g. how the Internet is affecting our children, how mobile phones change the way we communicate, etc.  Note how the technology has become the subject of the sentence and we are the objects upon which the verb is acted out.

Question - why do we insist on talking about technologies that do things to us, or affect us in a certain way?   Why do we not talk about the things we do with technologies or how we use them?  Why do we put ourselves in the position of passive receptor or 'victim' of technology?  Is it because we want to absolve ourselves of all responsibility for when things go wrong, or when negative side-effects appear?  If there is a problem with a company delivery, then we are told the computer is down or such like.  You never hear the excuse 'sorry, the computer programmer didn't foresee this problem and thus programmed the computer incompetently.'

Social Shaping of Technology

This theory concentrates on

• Actors (engineers, managers, scientists, consumers); and
• Networks in which the actors operate

Techs embody the culture that produced them.  Culture shapes technology.

BUT techs do have their limitations - they limit what is possible; design of a tech is limited by the nature of the materials used.

Technology as text

Like any other text, technology can be

• encoded - physically (in its design) and symbolically (styling, marketing)
• decoded - read by customers

Note that production and consumption of technologies must be considered together and symmetrically.

Preferred readings are encoded in technologies during their design (adverts, news stories, etc.)  A 'reader' is directed towards this particular reading but there are of course alternative readings.  Decoding is also shaped by the reader's own cultural framework and the reading thus generated may be at odds with the preferred reading envisioned by the technology's creators.  There is some degree of resistance and transformation on the part of the reader but we should not read too much into the power of this resistance (apologies for the pun!)

Aberrant or oppositional decodings

There are occasions for alternative uses for technologies, uses unimagined or unplanned by its producers (e.g. fax machine used by students to contact outsiders during Tiannamen Square incident).

New techs are cumulative

New techs have to fit into the context of existing techs.

The telephone

First uses of the telephone - broadcasting of: church services; concerts; political rallies, sporting events; news.  Telephone was thought appropriate only for businesses and household management.  Telephone companies took a long time to realise that encouraging subscribers to gossip would be good for profits. [see also Fischer, Touch Someone, 56]

Meanings of technology change

As a technology becomes more commonplace among the population, its meaning shifts.  This symbolic meaning is also shaped by culture.  Example - mobile phone in the beginning was only for elite businessmen, a marker of success.  Now it's used by everybody (school kids, plumbers, etc.)  It has lost its exclusivity.  To be marked out as an 'elite' mobile owner, you now have to be inaccessible.  

Hugh Mackay, ed. Consumption and Everyday Life.  London: Sage, 1997.