How would Steve Jobs approach the WSUD question? Lessons from Nokia and Apple

Most practitioners in the stormwater and WSUD industry have faced it at some stage – the frustrating comment back from councils, developers, lead architects or urban designers: “I really like your WSUD ideas, but it just costs too much”.  Unfortunately, it is largely unavoidable.  Although early involvement and strategic approaches to infrastructure planning and delivery can really help to reduce WSUD costs, those ideas will always end up costing more than reinforced concrete pipes. 

But that doesn’t mean that concrete pipes are the way of the future, I think it means that we just have to change our value proposition.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Nokia was the mobile phone brand to have. That was because they were the leaders in the race towards more compact and even folding handsets. But today, you can get a small compact mobile phone nearly for free.  The value has just about vanished.

Instead, people are looking for value in other places.

A few months ago, upon joining E2D, I went to pick a new handset. I was at the telco shop and picked up a $700 handset when I could have picked a free one. I did not even think twice.

The reason? I did not buy a phone. What I bought was a much more versatile, much more useful and powerful handset with many more functions: surfing the web, emails, banking, social media, etc. Smartphones today (and only Apple with their iPhone in the early days) offer so much more.  My economist friends would call this a net change in the level of service provided.

So what do we take away from this? 

I think the message is that we need to change the value proposition so that our customers see the net change that WSUD will bring, over and above the simple dollar amount.

Unfortunately, we’re probably still not quite good enough at the marketing of WSUD “Apple style”. Have customers understood what is so different about WSUD? Where can we find our Steve Jobs to do the selling? Where is WSUD taking off? Melbourne? Portland? Cambridge? Lyon? Who are going to be the early adopters?

From a user perspective, the mobile phone race was initially all about offering less for more money (smaller handset, etc.), but the net change in level of service has now changed this to a race for more (larger screens, more functions, more battery life, more accessories).  What will be the trigger for a change in customer expectation and needs? The next heat wave? The Bureau of Meteorology has just released the latest on ENSO: we’re heading into an El Nino summer: could this be the year?

From my perspective, Apple and Steve Jobs never sold phones, they never competed with Nokia on the mobile phone handset – they were marketing a user experience.  Could this be something else to try to get the WSUD value message across?

~ Julien Lepetit - [email protected]

PS: what was your best score at the Snake game?