Would you rather see humpback whales breaching, or a video of it?
Would you rather use Facetime, or have face time?
Would you rather see a Van Gogh, or a virtual reality re-creation?
Almost always, the physical item is superior to the virtual.
As soon as you pick up a physical book, you know a lot about it: is it a coffee table book with beautiful photos? A large reprint of Alice in Wonderland with the original illustrations? A novel? A novella? What is the quality of the materials? How does the paper feel? You have random access and can gain a lot of information quickly. Books in a Kindle or on a tablet are flattened and don’t give up nearly as much on first viewing.
Sales of ebook rose to about 25-30% of total book sales, but they’ve flattened at that level. The rest of the market still prefers physical books.
And physical items (and experiences) are more valuable because they cost more to produce.
Digital is all about convenience. You can carry thousands of songs on your phone, and listen with ear buds, but the quality is not as good as vinyl and great speakers – which is not as good as a live performance.
I heard a talk last week where the person claimed that the essence of customer experience these days is eliminating “friction”, which he seemed to define as eliminating humans.
Then why did Amazon pay $13.7 billion to buy Whole Foods stores?
Why did Apple and Warby Parker open physical stores after they had successful online stores?
Why are Walmart’s thousands of stores considered a major strategic asset, rather than an albatross?
A few years ago I heard the founder of PillPack, the online pharmacy, give a talk. He said that one of their initial discoveries was that seniors didn’t just want their meds packaged up neatly for consumption, they also wanted human support. PillPack couldn’t eliminate phone support; it’s why customers used them. And Amazon recently bought them, too.
It’s definitely more convenient to buy commodities online, and I do it all the time. But I also go to a local green grocer to buy my fruits and vegetables. I want to see what I’m getting, and not just have them show up in a box. I’m not alone; that store is very busy.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. The movement to digital is not inevitable. Use it for the customers who want it, and provide the real thing to those who want that.
