Why doesn’t my smartphone charge when I put it on a table?

By Anders Björklund

Why doesn’t my smartphone charge when I put it on a table?

How many times have you put your smartphone on a surface and when you got moving again you realise that you should have charged it?

I have been telling this story for many years now. It’s about when you sit in a meeting for an hour and at the end of the meeting your phone is fully charged. Everyone I know would think ‘finally I got rid of all the wires’. Very few people would throw themselves under the table and ask ’how was that possible!’

Imagine that this happens on a Thursday. And when you go with your family to IKEA on Saturday to buy a kitchen table you realise that there are two alternatives for the same white kitchen table. One for €120 and one for €500. The only difference is that the white table for €500 charges the families devices while eating. No matter where you put the device on the table.

On Monday, when you get back to work and put your devices on your desk you realise that your company actually doesn’t provide modern desks and think ‘what an old company I work for’.

And on Wednesday when you stay in a hotel during a business trip and you realise that the bed table don’t charge your devices and you start thinking that this is a ’shitty’ hotel.

I claim that as individuals we adopt and change expectations very rapidly once we get provided with effortless simplicity in any given situation.

The companies that realise that this is how it is, and start applying their offering based on how it is to be us (our reality, behaviour, habits, and expectations), will be the one’s who will win our trust. No matter if they are existing companies or start-ups! 

Talk to an expert

Anders Björklund
Founder, CEO & Strategist since 2001. Anders provides thoughts and reflections about how to think about onlinification and digitalisation in B2B.
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