Product identity

Seamus blogs about the conversation on "product identity" he, Jamie Wallace, Ajit Jaokar and myself had at Monday's Identity Society launch event:

This morning at the Identity Society inaugural unconference conversation ranged over a number of issues, but for me the most interesting was a discussion about product identity.

One of the concerns I've raised in the past has been with supermarkets labelling products according to whatever arbitrary system they happen to think people are worried about this week. Recently the chimera has been air miles, the distance food has flown to get to the shelves - a convenient straw man, as I argue here, to avoid the real issues of the road miles that contribute almost all of the carbon footprint of our food.

At today's event we discussed the possibility of products, as well as people, having verifiable identities - not just labels that retailers could tailor to their marketing needs or the fashionable concern of the moment but independently verifiable product idents that tell consumers where those products had come from, how they had been produced and perhaps other data such as the product/supplier's Ethiscore. The point being, of course, that different people are concerned about different things and will want different information about the same product, not a one-size-fits-all label that tells them a single irrelevant stat about how many miles their haddock spent on a plane.



Japan seems to be some way to solving this problem already with QR codes - a customisable consumer-readable barcode that Japanese mobile phones are being modified to scan and interpret (Adverlab).

RFID chips and other tracking tools may be the long-term solution for user-controlled logistical planning, but it's heartening to see that the requirement we identified in a half-hour brainstorm for a consumer-readable product idents/details is already a solved problem just waiting to make its way here. Complex information tags that can be read by a mobile phone open the door to all sorts of possibilities, not just limited to the quantity of data that can be stored in the tag. Once products can be readily identified by any consumer with a mobile phone the mobile web comes into its own. Not every purchaser has to carry out their own investigative journalism to find out whether a given product meets their own standards of (say) price, environmental impact and ethical production. They just need access to a reliable source of that research while they shop.

Interesting that Seamus mentions the Japanese barcode-reading phones angle, as that popped in and out of my head too during the conversation but I forgot to mention it! The Japanese are way ahead of pretty much all countries except South Korea with mobile tech, and this is a good example of their sophistication.

Once people can easily and quickly use their mobiles to hop from the product on any retailer's shelf (ubiquity is clearly key here) to third-party information resources (e.g. a product information wiki), things could get very interesting indeed in the field of product identity.

Another possibility is that retailers may just feel incentivised to begin to open up their own product information databases for remixing by these third-party resources, should they gather enough steam.

After all, competition is competition, whether the beans are costed in cash or carbon.