Dancing Outside the Digital Domain

With e-commerce continuing to see strong growth and cloud-computing becoming accepted, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the sales of products and services is still very much alive and well in the “real world” – people are still buying things off-line when they could easily do so online.

It’s a pretty obvious and straightforward notion but once in a while you get reminded about how “analog” behavior is still thriving in an increasingly digital world.

This was illustrated in yesterday’s New York Times, which had a “Digital Domain” story about Redbox, which operates 15,600 kiosks in the U.S. that rents videos for $1/day. Redbox rents more than 7.5 million movies a week, compared with the 10 million/week rented by Netflix.

The story includes a great quote from consultant Tom Adams about why Redbox is thriving.

“We’re only 10,000 years out of caves,” he said. “Humans like to go out and get stuff and bring it home – we’re just wired that way.”

Redbox’s success says about human nature and how we’re psychologically designed to be social and to seek the company of other humans – even if we’re talking about a business transaction involved a kiosk.

It’s the same kind of behaviour that explains the popularity of events such as DemoCamp that attracts lots people who spend a lot of time on social networks.

While you can interact and build relationships digitally, there is a need and appetite to also connect physically.

In fact, I would argue that you could have a really strong relationship with someone digitally but it goes to a completely higher and different level when you meet someone in real-life – even if only happens once.

Whether it’s video kiosks or networking opportunities, there’s a growing place for digital but it’s not going displace the real-world any time soon.