#99: Why we need better endings
A Q&A with founder, designer, and endineer, Joe MacLeod
I think it’s fair to say that humans suck at endings. From products and services to relationships, even life itself, we’re often in denial about the end of an experience—assuming it’s supposed to feel worse than the start.
Not Joe MacLeod.
Joe is the founder of the world’s first customer-ending business. He’s on a mission to help individuals and organisations design better endings through writing, speaking, training, and consulting. Along the way, his work has been featured by the likes of Wired, TEDx, and Fast Company.
I first heard Joe speak about endings at a Gothenburg Creative Mornings lecture in 2017. The irony of starting my day by thinking about the end wasn’t lost on me, and a seed got planted. Fast forward to this June year and I found myself writing about endings after attending a beautiful goodbye celebration for an organisation I cared about. I reached out to Joe, and here we are. December seemed like the right time to publish, for obvious reasons.
Why are you so interested in endings?
They are so overlooked in product creation. As one of my cohort participants said, "Endings are the biggest issue hiding in plain sight." Endings have an enormous influence on society and have sociological implications, so they are a fascinating area to study.
People often think we overlook endings because of some sort of hard-nosed business logic. As I also did years ago. My first book Ends. reframes the problem with endings as a sociological issue from centuries ago. Changes in finance, fasting, and careers from the Protestant Uprising laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution and the following marketing boom to distance endings as part of the consumption experience. Creating an enormous hole in meaning at the end. We now need to adjust that.
Endings are critical to reimagining our approach to product consumption and creation. The thesis of Endineering focuses on the consumer experience. Many initiatives to improve consumerism focus on materials. Although important, consumerism is driven by emotions, not materials, so it is important we engage around experiences at the end.
What does Martin Luther have to do with our modern understanding of endings?
I start the story of endings in many of my keynotes with death and the emergence of changes in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Particularly after the plague and the rise of the Protestants, with Martin Luther as a central figure.
Within this rise came new ways of thinking about jobs, fasting, and debt. Not to mention a different relationship with death and afterlife. These changes influenced society thereafter, and laid the foundations for the industrial revolution, not in a material or mechanistic way, but in a consumer psychological way.
For example, historically we would be far more comfortable with witnessing and being around death. People would be invited in to hear the person's thoughts on life before they died. A testament. It was an important experience to witness and to have as a dying person. All sorts of people were welcomed into the room—neighbours, children. Over centuries we have mechanised and distanced this. Service personnel manage the experience who have no relationship to the dying person. People have pain managed, and often die comfortably but alone, without sharing their testament. We now talk about the Will part: “What money did they leave?” We look at material over meaning at the end. I expand on this in much more detail in Ends.
Think of gyms. The most innovative gym will look at the data and say to themselves, "People don’t like going to gyms. They leave gyms. Let's make the best leaving experience of all the gyms." That gym will then be the most successful.
How can a good ending become a competitive advantage?
In many ways!
First, good endings can avoid business risk. Businesses gather extensive customer data during onboarding and usage, tracking desire and product engagement. But at the end? Hardly any data is captured, leaving businesses in the dark. Ignoring this stage is a business risk—endings are part of your business.
Second, businesses that engage at the end also boost consumer satisfaction. Netflix exemplifies this with its flexible, easy-to-cancel contracts, unlike US cable companies, which impose year-long contracts with penalties. Netflix’s consumer satisfaction is in the mid-80s and rising, while US cable companies are in the mid-60s and have been declining for 11 years. The difference is the end. Some businesses design for it and make it appear clear and comfortable. Others avoid it.
Think of Gyms. We will all start signing up again in the new year with good intentions, and many of us will be faced with contracts and their punitive clauses for early leaving. Some of us will break free. Then we will all do the same thing the following year. Happy for a few months, then sad trying to leave. Gyms have been offering this service for a long time. The most innovative gym will look at the data and say to themselves, "People don’t like going to gyms. They leave gyms. Let's make the best leaving experience of all the gyms." That gym will then be the most successful.
Third, sales. People often say, "With every good end, starts a beginning." This misses the point. Businesses excel at beginnings but overlook how endings impact sales. As Daniel Pink notes, customers feel reassured by a clear exit. Kia Cars' 7-year warranty provided an ending to the product. Customers loved it so much that it doubled global sales.
Fourth, brand equity. Brands lose a lot when a customer leaves—not just the revenue of a loyal customer but, arguably more importantly, the brand equity. The gargantuan effort, resources, and money at the beginning are lost at the end. Any consumer who has found it difficult to leave a service will say to themselves, "Never again." Businesses need to protect their brand and the memories of a good experience at the end.
You also believe that good endings can contribute towards circularity and sustainability. Can you explain how?
Many proposed solutions to overconsumption focus on technical or efficiency improvements, often requiring new purchases of “more sustainable” products or putting a certification symbol where a consumer experience should be.
Today, publicly listed companies spend $220,000 to $480,000 annually on ratings (Reuters), often leading to certificates and marketing symbols. Consumers struggle to understand the many environmental labels. There are 200 labels in the EU and over 450 worldwide.
These actions miss the point. Consumerism is driven by desire and emotion, not rationality. Yet so few conversations are happening about this in Circularity. A product's offboarding needs to be a consumer experience, not just a passive circular material. We should design consumer offboarding experiences that bond provider and consumer together in mutual purpose to neutralise the negative consequences of consumption.
Patagonia's Worn Wear initiative is a good example of this: being really active at the end of the product lifecycle, getting involved in a material and tangible way, and building an experience around it. Rapanui's recycling program is another example within the fashion industry.
You’re arguing that consumer endings require good experience design. What are the characteristics of a good ending? How can organisations get better at designing them?
A good consumer off-boarding experience should be…
connected consciously to the rest of the experience through emotional triggers that are measurable and actionable by the user.
It should identify and bond the consumer and provider together in mutual responsibility. Its aim should be to neutralise the negative consequences of consumption. It should be concluded in a timely manner and avoid assets falling outside the consumer lifecycle.
Each of these statements can be focused on to build part of a wider experience.
Good endings don't stop at consumer experiences. Employees and organisations deserve good endings, too. I love how Wind Down has applied the essence of Endineering to non-profit closures. The Decelerator has similar ambitions, supporting civil society organisations grappling with an imminent ending. On top of
, they even have a free coaching hotline.Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?
Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus is an amazing book about Microcredit lending and its impact on people's lives.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff is an eye-opening guide to the techniques and applications of Big Tech that also makes a pretty good contemporary history book.
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler is a wonderful book about creative acts of all sorts and why we do them.
Want to learn more about Endings? Become an Endineer! Joe is offering Pass It On readers 25% off his online 4-week Endineering training course. Use the discount code 25offendscohort at checkout. You can also use the code NCKEV for 25% off the Ends and Endineering ebooks.
Big thanks to Joe. And to you as always for reading. I’ll be back in a few days with a final post before the end of the year.
Lauren
Thanks to Joe for giving The Wind Down a name check!