The Right to Repair: How Can Brands Benefit from Allowing Customers to Maintain and Repair Their Own Tech Products?

Why do some technology products provide years of continued use while others are dogged by connectivity failures, battery woes, and apps that crash?

The interconnected nature of modern technologies means that continued use depends on a products’ capacity to interact with other devices, objects, and infrastructures. Consider gaming consoles that interact with televisions, Bluetooth connections, internet connections, and electricity infrastructures. Their continued use is facilitated or disrupted depending on whether they can establish and maintain these connections.

In a new Journal of Marketing study, we find that customers take active roles in extending a technology product’s lifecycle and that companies must consider this “entropy work” before limiting or encouraging these activities. Entropy work spans maintenance and repair activities, such as checking connections, resetting/cleaning devices, applying updates, replacing parts, and consulting others for help. When people cannot perform entropy work, they experience declines in the usefulness and ease-of-use of their devices.

The increasing prevalence of smart technologies means that these connectivity problems are increasing the amount of entropy work required from users. Moreover, technology companies often restrict users’ abilities to maintain and repair devices and connections. For instance, using third-party parts to replace failing displays or batteries tends to result in annoying notifications or reduced device functionality for iPhone users.

Continued Use Trajectories

By exploring this issue through the lived experiences of technology consumers, we identify four “continued use trajectories” that chart common events during the lifecycle of a variety of technology products from adoption to disposal.

1. First, some products enjoy a supporting trajectory in which devices work seamlessly with others, automatically connecting and functioning for long periods. For instance, Samsung partners with iFixit, a firm that empowers consumers to maintain their own devices through kits and guides. As such, Samsung sanctions its customers to maintain Galaxy smartphones with the support of a trusted third party.
   
   
2. Second, a decaying trajectory occurs when a tech product is easy to use in its early years but thereafter sees gradual declines in performance. Batteries drain faster, programs get slower, and connections to other tech products become complex.
   
   This situation can be caused by the nature of after-sales support: When consumers receive support to perform entropy work early on but this help recedes in later years, the usefulness of a device will likely decay. For instance, AppleCare is available for two to three years after purchase and, once that warranty ends, customers must consult costly certified technicians or attempt entropy work without support.
   
   
3. The third trajectory is a taxing trajectory in which tech products quickly fail to function as expected and consumers need immediate help. Famously, Samsung immediately recalled and replaced many of its smartphones in 2016 after reports of overheating and explosions. By immediately owning the problem, Samsung salvaged its brand image.
   
   
4. Finally, tech products can exist in oscillating trajectories, going back and forth between functioning properly and running into problems. These situations are frustrating because they force consumers to do unpredictable amounts and kinds of entropy work.

When users cannot derive the useful benefits of a device, they are more likely to abandon it, but they also get frustrated with brands. And if a company restricts consumers’ ability to receive help from outside sources and funnels them toward their own services, consumers can feel trapped.

To navigate these different trajectories, companies can provide resources such as guides for common recurring problems. Moreover, they can establish or endorse platforms that offer free troubleshooting advice, like Reddit communities and Adobe’s community, which offer support for products.

The Right to Repair

Given the worsening cost-of-living crisis, we can understand why consumers increasingly demand the “right to repair” their own devices via access to third-party services and parts. Oregon, Colorado, and the European Union have all enacted right-to-repair laws, illustrating a growing movement’s momentum to guarantee consumers’ ability to perform entropy work and maintain their devices.

Mindful of these movements, companies must consider how they support or limit consumers’ entropy work. We offer several suggestions for chief marketing officers:

• Keep in mind that as the connectivity of a tech product increases, the chances for these connections to enable problems to emerge increases.
  
  
• Incentivize customers to upgrade to a new device to improve ease-of-use when entropy work overwhelms them.
  
  
• Implement holistic investigations into which technologies, people, and other objects have the capacities to increase the entropy work customers must do to maintain their device’s continued use.
  
  
• Establish enduring service relationships when tech product issues are likely to recur to help customers maximize periods of stable continued use.

Source: Paolo Franco, Robin Canniford, Marcus Phipps, and Amber M. Epp, “Continued Use Trajectories: How Entropy Work Sustains Technology Assemblages,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing