A person who thinks about product “value” only in terms of conspicuous features against dollars spent evidently doesn’t share Fairphone values, consequently there’s no reason for she or he to try to give an answer to the question at the top of this thread. To convince someone to use a Fairphone is simple: you just need to show that this is the only phone based on business, technological and utilization models that respect consumer privacy and sustainability principles.
4 Likes
On the topic of battery conservation, no tech trickery will ever fix smartphones’ high battery use as long as the GAFAs business model is based on private data harvesting.
My phones’ batteries have good longevity simply because I don’t allow them to be nodes in bloodsucking GAFAs’ networks.
1 Like
I disagree with this rather black-and-white argument. Here’s some entirely fictional scenario’s that show some of the conflicts.
Person #1 cares about fairness. But also desires a good camera. Unfortunately, to person #1 the camera of FP2 doesn’t quite cut it. He/she now has two options: spend €530 on a Fairphone and another €300 on a non-fair compact camera, or just spend €550 on an unfair phone with a better camera. Which one is better? Option one uses up more natural resources and still requires child labour and unfair minerals, but involves the Fairphone brand. Option two uses fewer resources and allows to pocket €250 to be spent freely (on Tony Chocolonely’s and Fairtrade cotton t-shirts perhaps?)
Person #2 also cares about fairness. But is also concerned about his/her security. Unfortunately, banks have stopped giving out cards without contactless transactions, which are susceptible to fraud even when unused as they can be interacted with while they sit on your pocket. Rather than carrying these bank cards around, person #2 would rather have the cards embedded in the phone, so that the NFC signal is only enabled when person #2 wants it to. Fairphone doesn’t permit this…
I’m sure we can have a lengthy discussion about whether these examples are contrived or not, but the point I’m trying to make is that you and I don’t get to decide what other people find important, and thus which features are “conspicuous”. I can think along, I can provide suggestions (why not just invest in an aluminium wallet, person #2?), but I can’t and shouldn’t want to decide.
This statement is either assuming that the person you’re trying to convince only cares about consumer privacy and sustainability, or assuming that you can project your values wholesale onto others. I’m afraid that in my experience both are usually false. For a lot of people, fairness is one of the many factors that plays a role when making a purchase. Unless you’re ultra-wealthy, price definitely plays a factor. Satisfaction (simply “does the phone do what I want it to do”) matters, which is defined differently for each individual. And although Fairphone is still (sadly! 
) unmet in terms of fairness, the price/satisfaction ratio logically must have decreased since release as feature-wise comparative phones have gone down in price.
Actually, this is not 100% true. When compared to two years ago, they upgraded the camera and ship with a more reliable case, plus they improved on fairness. Does that compensate for the €150-180 value drop when compared to unfair-but-featurewise-comparative phones? I can’t say of course, but I suspect only the best in the world would answer “yes, more fairness is invaluable” while the majority are more likely to answer “no”.
If a company only cares about the part of the population who perceive fairness (or “consumer privacy and sustainability” for that matter) as the sole important factor for buying a phone, they’ll not only fail in their mission to sell fair phones - because that market is tiny -, but also fail in their mission to spread awareness among bigger masses. So the way I see it, it’s all about being an ethical business but a business nonetheless. Which means finding the right balance between price, consumer satisfaction and fairness. For Fairphone to be able to continue being a force for the good in the market in the upcoming few years, I think it would be completely justified to re-assess where their product stands on this scale and whether there are options to improve upon this without compromising on their fair values.
And at the same time you couldn’t be more right. These are the Fairphone 2 unique selling points that must make a difference when you try to convince someone to make the leap and pay the premium. But as the price/satisfaction gap with non-fair competitors widens, I sincerely fear this will impress fewer and fewer people enough to vote with their wallet and purchase a Fairphone 2.
4 Likes
There is no reason for the gap to widen, production costs for Fairphone can equally fall, like in the rest of the industry, or new modules can have improved features, like it happened in the past. A whole new Fairphone will eventually see daylight, but only when a new platform becomes really necessary. Your mistake is that you’re trying to apply an outdated business analytical framework to a radically new business model, with entirely different values and consumer base.
Let me reword a point I made a few posts back. According to the cost breakdown, the materials of the FP2 amount to about €230 of the price. From what I can tell, that would be the only place where Fairphone would be able to bring the cost down provided that market forces work. Sadly, they don’t work in Fairphones favour, and there’s no way they can chop €170 off of that. Firstly because Fairphone does not nearly make the kind of bulk orders that other major players make, giving them little leverage against the major suppliers. Secondly, because the most promising cost factor to reduce is the SoC (DRAM and storage aren’t getting cheaper these days, and peripherals already are relatively low-price). Judging by the lack of support from Qualcomm even for Android 7 (Fairphone is pushing the wagon itself on this one), this SoC is discontinued. That’s not going to get cheaper with time… if anything it would get more expensive as this is now a hardly-produced legacy product. To bring the price of the core module down (and I suspect that wouldn’t save more than €10-20), they’d instead have to start purchasing newer, lower end SoCs (like perhaps a Snapdragon 632, or maybe even a lower-end Snapdragon 429) that come with a lower price tag. Sadly, the engineering effort to integrate this with the rest of the system would be large enough to justify talking about a new phone (that can hopefully re-use components from the current model). At this point “new phone” is a matter of semantics…
I wish this was only my mistake, but this is deeply rooted in the various capitalist markets that we work with in the Western world. I’m not convinced that the majority of the consumer base targeted by Fairphone is “entirely different”. The whole point of the Fairphone operation is to try and challenge this mentality, to make them aware of the injustice happening in this world such that hopefully they can develop these values. But that would be a slow transformation, certainly not one that they have completed today. If they want to reach a large audience today, they also have to play the game of the market as it stands today - minus the exploitation - and convince their audience that there is a satisfaction or value to be gained from choosing sustainable and fair that justifies or even outweighs the price premium.
3 Likes
Your analytical mistakes can be exemplified by this statement:
this is deeply rooted in the various capitalist markets that we work with in the Western world. I’m not convinced that the majority of the consumer base targeted by Fairphone is “entirely different”.
The consumer base targeted by firms like Fairphone is entirely different by definition. You won’t ever be able to understand business models of sustainability-driven firms if you can’t grasp this fact.
I think I said enough, so this is my last reply to your replies. Bye! 
I am not sure releasing a new phone is a break of the policy per se. I believe they are, at the moment, unable to support the FP2 for five years and release a new model yet. I am 100% sure there has to me a new model next year and I can imagine Fairphone will be able to shorten the release cycle and keep on supporting the phones for 5 years. With market share, two or three models at the same time are realistic.
I don’t agree. Consumers choices are not binay, but most times, we balance thinks like value for money, ethical / environmental and feature »needs«. I know there is a core fan base that , thankfully, still buys the FP2 for 500€+ today. I think that is great, but to be fair, while I bought the FP2 a few years back, I wouldn’t buy it at that price today. The reasons are all here in this thread. I try to buy fairtrade and organic food, for example. But I would not buy the organic apples if they were four times the price. I am sure the same applies to Fairphone.
What does this even matter? Fairphone is a for-profit company. A social company, see bcorp, but still. They also stated market share issues several times (for example to ensure spare part availability, to reduce costs, to make more impact with better contracts at the factories, etc. Furthermore, they operate in a business that greatly profits from scale. For example, see the effort to develop Android 7 for the FP2: It’s expansive, requires specialists and essentially the same amount of work, no matter if done for 100.000 or 1.000.000 phones.
I have (crowd) invested in Fairphone because I believe in the ideals and unique approach, but I also believe that if we want Fairphone to still strive and make an impact in a few years, we need to take the voices of critics serious. Fairphone must be more then the only morally acceptable phone, it must also be a very good phone.
5 Likes
If that were so, I would wholeheartedly agree with you.
But I don’t think that your assumption is right. The targe of Fairphone - as I understand it - is to change the market, to make other companies change their production, following the example of Fairphone, simply because the consumers show that this is what they want.
Why else would Fairphone use the slogan “Together we can change the way products are made”
I really hope, that they don’t see themselves as a small company, building a special (niche)product for a small group of customers. Companies of that kind have vanished by the dozen when their customer-group lost interest or just “grew out” of it
2 Likes
I think that we can nevertheless tell our friends that they are doing wrong in our eyes if they don’t buy a Fairphone or a second-hand phone.
Nobody wants to be bad. Many people though are still not fully aware of the grave problems in electronics supply chains. When a friend of mine got a new phone, I asked her, " Why didn’t you get a Fairphone? Your new phone supports child labour and social and environmental exploitation." She answered that she hadn’t known about these things and was a bit sad about it.
In response to the topic title I think we should tell people about the huge problems in smartphone production and make them aware about them. This was happening from the very beginning (pre-FP1), but I have the feeling that lately we tend to talk more about modularity than about exploitation (certainly because it is much easier to explain the former).
5 Likes
I agree with you there, although I have the impression, that many - if not most - users of Fairphone are a bit tech-minded, loving all those technical possibilities.
While there’s nothing really new on the social aspects of the Fairphone, there are so many technical possibilities, OS-developments and even someone designing a new motherboard, that the discussion is focusing on the “by nature”.
Btw., in my opinion technical developments are making new smartphones so fascinating in general, that they are therefore primarily adressed by marketing experts to sell the latest model.
So it comes quite natural to counter that marketing by explaining the technical features of the phone, while the social engangement (at least to most) is so evident, it seems to need no emphasizing. But you are right of course, that all aspects of fairness should be explained in depths, when “selling” Fairphone to others.
2 Likes
The problem IMO is that Fairphone can only lose on this front. Truth is that the FP2 is not competitive anymore if you only take the technical specifications into account.
3 Likes
If you look at the investment sheet for the recent crowdfunding campaign, there is on page 22:
And then they also write in that document that they’ll focus on the regions in Western Europe where they are already operating plus expanding to Scandinavia and Southern Europe. And if I got it correctly, this is on a time scale till 2021.
To me, targeted 285,000 phones per year (less than one day of iPhones around xmas) still looks pretty small.
4 Likes
I’m convinced that this impression is created by the filter bubble of this forum. “Many” might be right but I disagree with “most”. My real-world experiences with FP-users (none of them active here as far as I can say) are different
What can be said for sure is that FP-users chose their phone more consciously than many other smartphone users, but not necessarily on the technical aspect.
3 Likes
Yeah, you’re right there of course.
As I was responding to @Stefan, I had this forum in mind but forgot to make that clear.
@Stefan
Sure, FP is technically way behind actual smartphones in the same pricerange; yet it still impresses, when I have the display disassembled in seconds. The modularity - that you rightfully mentioned - is an absolutely outstanding feature and still unchallenged by any other available phone.
@Ingo
Yes, they are in fact a small company and they don’t aim to sell millions of phones in the next years. But at the same time they develop business solutions and aim at making FP a company phone. And that is way off from producing a niche-product for some kind of geeks; that’s what I meant (like the failed kite-project).
5 Likes
You could! But that’s no guarantee to convince someone. Telling people they did something wrong often makes the receiver of such a message become defensive. Which makes sense. You tell them that they have been careless in picking the best possible phone, which clashes with their sentiment that they picked a nice phone that they’re satisfied with.
Here’s one from the negotiation playbook: if you want to convince someone, you’ll have to understand what they care about. Not you, not the Fairphone employees, but the person you wish to convince. Have a conversation with them and try to understand what their core values and beliefs are. Chances are you won’t find this out about people when you just talk about phones… so genuinely listen and be curious about them. Once you understand what they care about, you can explain why Fairphone tailors to their values.
For someone who cares more than anything about eradicating injustice in the world, this is an easy message because Fairphone is tailored for them. But what about a family person, someone who cares about nothing more in the world than (their) children. They might consider recycling as their duty because it leaves a better planet for the next generation, but they don’t necessarily consider the hidden injustice of exploitation in the supply chain on a daily basis. To give a crude example, I suspect that family people probably resonate more with the message that Fairphone makes an effort to eradicate child labour in the mines than to the message that they prevent workers in China from making 16-hour shifts six days a week to make ends meet. Child labour is bad, you wouldn’t wish that to your child. Sacrificing your life to make ends meet for your family is heroic. Instead, you might remind them that Fairphone enables these factory workers to spend more time with their family without compromising on monthly wage.
I’m probably explaining this a bit simplistically, but it is all about the angle at which you tell your story. It makes the difference between “respectfully provoking thought” and “(condescendingly) listing reasons to be smug about your purchase”. Okay, I worded the latter a bit extremely, but I’ve seen a lot of that happen to various degrees and it really works counter-productive. Don’t assume that your values are the same as theirs, and don’t assume you can impose your values upon others blindly. By tailoring your message to their values they’ll be more receptive because they feel understood and feel like there’s something in it for them.
…
Sorry, I didn’t respond to the nuances you added in the remainder of the post, but I think this… essay ( ) is equally valid in other situations. In your scenario I suspect that opposing injustice is indeed a strong motivator in the life of the recepient. Equally, if people strongly believe that we should minimise waste (or are fascinated by technological challenges), the modular design could well be the most appealing aspect of the FP2 to them. 
3 Likes
Thanks for that great explanation.
It should be made a Wiki.
Seriously.
I just wonder about one point:
In my opinion, you should be open to accept, that there are some people out there, for whom the Fairphone is not tailored, though you still could try to get them thinking. Or am I just lacking ideas?
1 Like
Oh 100%! Some people’s values and interests just don’t align with the FP2, and I would be perfectly honest with them and explain that this is probably not the product for them if they ask. Bad advice, no matter how well intended, is still bad advice. And if you advise a friend to purchase something he/she will not be happy with, you’ll lose trust. That doesn’t do anyone a favour.
The other thing you can do is being on the other side of the conversation. If the conversation partner is genuinely curious about why you chose for an FP2, rather than listing the list of solutions that you can find on the website all the same, try and find out what is it about those reasons that really matters to you. Maybe pick one from the list that particularly captures and moves you you and ask yourself “why does this one thing matter to me”.
For example: One of the conclusions I drew from years of soul searching is that one of my core values is (mutual) respect. This is relevant because I’m personally attracted by the efforts Fairphone makes to treat the workers in upcoming economies with more respect by offering dignified wages and working hours. That truly matters to me, if I were in charge I would never treat anyone like that… Fairphone offered me the means to contribute a small amount towards ending such modern day slavery practices. To try and treat people elsewhere with a level of respect closer to how I would personally treat those who I encounter in my life.
If you genuinely(!) share your FP motivations - without sounding judgemental by the least about others of course; this is now about you, not about anyone else -, you give others a peek into the decision making that goes on inside you. And by doing so, by showing your trust in your conversation partner and letting them get to know you on a more personal level, you can build mutual respect. From personal experience, the only ones whose values I would consider aligning with mine are my closest friends and family, the people with who I have built up a strong relationship of trust.
That last realisation is very important. I don’t think you’re going to get a passer-by to build up a relationship of trust strong enough to make a lasting personal impression. But people who express genuine interest in you, people who are (on track to become) your friend, often subconsciously approve of your values even if they differ from theirs. Making them explicit can make others think, and you owe it to them to have the same curiosity towards their values and decisions. Because who knows, it might enrich you as well.
3 Likes
I don’t ever have a guarantee. To me your post sounded a bit like a trickery — tricking someone into buying a Fairphone by finding out where their vulnerable spots are. It took me a while to find out, what it is about your posts that doesn’t resonate with me.
Defensiveness to me is a sign of wrongdoing. If someone has to defend themselves, they (possibly subconsciously) know that their action wasn’t completely correct and (morally?) justified. They are just not being honest about it to themselves and to me. Luckily my friend didn’t react this way. 
Of course I will be kind and loving when I tell someone that in my eyes one of their actions was wrong (or I try to be, which I sometimes fail). Ultimately everyone is their own master and takes their own decisions. If I think about it, maybe I’m not so much into convincing anybody about buying a Fairphone… The last thing I want is to force my will upon someone.
3 Likes
Thank you, this is a really important point to make! Your response isn’t false: this can be used for trickery. This is pretty much what that dreaded car salesman does. But it also describes how you resolve conflicts or debates with others, or how you show empathy to others, because the principles are the same: be curious and listen to the other, try and understand why they feel the way they do, try and place yourself in their shoes. I’m convinced you do this subconsciously all the time.
The difference between empathy and trickery is then your intention. If you genuinely try to make a positive contribution to someone’s life by understanding them and working with them, you’re a genuine empathic good human being. If you set yourself the goal to benefit yourself or the company you (at that point) represent, you’re performing an act of marketing.
Absolutely! I don’t think I would, unless I already know someone’s values well enough to know they’d be interested to learn about the project. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever applied this principle consciously except in a controlled training environment. But if someone tries to convince themselves and asks you for advice, I equally believe that sending the message in the context of their values is more helpful to them than sending the message in the context of my values. It’s a fine line between empathy and manipulation, and you’re responsible for not crossing it.
With this I disagree. Defensiveness is simply a response to a perceived attack. If I am convinced I did a good job - I bought a phone I’m really happy with - and you tell me I did wrong, as a human being I’d rather show that I’m competent than admit to you I’m not. Which means I’ll go out and defend myself by explaining the train of thought leading to my decision in the context of my values, which often makes 100% sense to me. If you then proceed to attack the values that led to my decision (or the lack thereof), chances are big that I feel disrespected. At this point you can say what you want to me, but I’ll just put it aside because there’s no trust in you.
This tells you nothing about whether I was actually wrong or not. Because often there’s no wrong. Perhaps I was embarrassed to admit that I chose my phone based on aesthetics, because I know you think that isn’t important in the grand scheme of things. But I’m perfectly entitled to choose a product based on its looks. Or maybe I really did overlook the opportunity to make a difference in the world. In both cases I’d turn defensive if you tell me I’m wrong though, because before you did I felt I did something good.
Believe it or not, but the divided left-right bipartisan politics situation in the UK and US have come this far because the communication between the public actors are all based on attacks and defenses, rather than a mutual attempt at understanding. There’s a distrust towards the other side, and that leads to people locking themselves up in echo chambers instead.
4 Likes