Walking the Real Cost of a Smartphone: A Barefoot Reflection on the 4Ps
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Marketing Sustainability and Ethics
13 January 2026

Marketing is very good at making things look smooth and easy. A rush of unboxing, dreamy imagery, flashy tech, and suddenly you are convinced you deserve it or need it or are falling behind without it. So it goes click, buy, next-day delivery, little rush, repeat, upgrade. That is the demand-stimulating side of marketing at work (Chartered Institute of Marketing, 2023).

Last night my husband told me he needs a new phone because his current one will not update anymore. Other than that, it is eight years old and in great condition. He is basically forced to buy a new one. Between you and me, I think he also loves the permission this gives him to get a shiny new toy.

That illusion cracked for me, like my screen, the day my family and I went to GeoFort in Herwijnen, Netherlands and were told to take our shoes off and walk a loooooong barefoot trail representing the journey of a smartphone from raw material to disposal. What hit me was how long it was, how uncomfortable it became, and how eye-opening it was. It was immersive marketing, but instead of selling a product, it sold awareness. The exhibit shows the process and materials used in phones and makes you physically experience every stage (GeoFort, n.d.).

From the start the ground was rough. Sand, rocks, metal fragments, rubber, then broken glass. Uncomfortable enough that you had to slow down and think about every step. The opposite of how buying a phone feels. Along the path were visuals of land scarred by mining and people affected by extraction. That moment made me realise the material inside a phone is not as clean-cut as marketing makes it seem. It is energy intensive, earth intensive, and human intensive, and raises uncomfortable questions when set against the UN Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015). And yet no, I am not giving up my iPhone, just feeling more aware and slightly guilty.

The trail represented the materials and processes behind a smartphone and its packaging. Phones bring together many different elements, while their production also uses water and energy. That raises ethical questions about extraction, manufacturing and disposal (European Commission, 2020; ITU & UNITAR, 2024). Packaging adds another layer of material to the experience before the gadget is even switched on.

Phones typically contain lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, gold, silver, palladium, tin, tungsten, rare earth elements, silicon, aluminium, and glass (Andrae, 2016), and are shipped back and forth around the world at different assembly stages. They are metal-rich, but recovering the materials can be difficult; disposal is part of a wider e-waste problem (ITU & UNITAR, 2024).

And then there is the packaging. Cardboard, inks, coatings, protective films: another set of materials around the product. Packaging can shape the way a brand is experienced (Underwood & Klein, 2002). Once the unboxing is over, I find myself wondering how much of that carefully staged experience is immediately headed for the bin.

That barefoot walk made the conflict between marketing and sustainability very real, especially when you look at the 4Ps.

Product. Marketing keeps offering another reason to want a new camera, a faster processor or a slimmer design. When repair feels difficult and replacement feels normal, it becomes easier to stop asking whether the existing phone could last. Durability and life-cycle thinking deserve a place in the product story too. Boy, though, does marketing make a new phone feel like a rush.

Price. Marketing makes you feel like you got a deal! A trade-in offer or an upgrade plan can make the next phone feel affordable, while the wider costs of extraction, working conditions and waste remain much less visible. That is the ethical question I take from thinking about externalised costs (Raworth, 2017). Nobody wants a financial buzzkill, but a convenient price does not answer every question about value.

Promotion. Marketing is built to stimulate desire. You see phones unboxed perfectly, as if they arrived from nowhere rather than from global mining and manufacturing systems. Sustainability claims often focus on recycled cardboard or efficiency gains, which are small pieces of a much bigger story. Research shows that this selective storytelling can mislead consumers and drift into greenwashing, even when claims are technically true (Delmas & Burbano, 2011). All we wanted was permission and this gives it to us and helps us sleep at night.

Place. Distribution decisions prioritise speed and convenience. Delivery speed, transport and packaging all deserve attention when we look at the footprint of convenience. That ease of purchase is central to modern marketing, but it also increases environmental pressure behind the scenes (European Environment Agency, 2023). Amazon came to my house 4 times today with things from all around the world that I ordered last night! 😮 The message from GeoFort seems to have worn off with time and convenience. Oops.

Walking barefoot made it impossible to ignore how far comfort is removed from real cost. The classic marketing definition about satisfying needs profitably sounds fine until profit depends on faster replacement cycles and hidden damage (Chartered Institute of Marketing, 2023). Maybe that definition is outdated. Maybe marketing should be about education about what are our needs? We need to not have to pick up the environmental bill down the line.

Repairable phones and refurbishment models interest me because they aim to keep a useful device in service for longer. Product policy can support that direction too: the EU’s 2024 right-to-repair directive and complementary ecodesign measures were intended to make repair more attractive and products more durable and repairable (Council of the European Union, 2024). I would like to get that feel-good rush from keeping something working.

That barefoot trail did something marketing can also do. It showed that sustainability can be a commodity for a buyer if it's marketed inside the decision process about product, price, promotion, and place it does not necessarily mean less profit but profit differently. If marketing can sell desire so effectively, it can also sell the desire to be honest about the real cost of creating it and still promote returns. Or with all this backpedaling in sustainability lately, am I being naive?

This is something I think about with every organisation I work with. It is a hard problem because the commercial incentives are real.

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the distance between wants and needs. How do you convince someone they do not need something? And which organisation would pay a marketer to do that? We are paid by people who want to sell. Have we, as marketers, sold our souls?

References

Council of the European Union. (2024, May 30). Circular economy: Council gives final approval to right-to-repair directive. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/05/30/circular-economy-council-gives-final-approval-to-right-to-repair-directive/