Marketing's Digital Obsession.

Marketers have realised that women are the key purchase decision-makers. Marketers have belatedly begun to realise that demography is skewed to the elderly (even though economics classes were pointing that out twenty years ago. Marketers will eventually have to acknowledge that technology is a tool and not the the reason for the behaviour. But in the interim, we'll have to endure a lot of nonsense like digital paper.

How ever fine or specially treated it may be; what ever digital machine you might insert it in; regular paper is and always will be analogue not digital. To suggest otherwise is just another example of marketing's obsession with newness. An obsession that's arguably even worse than its fixations on youth and authenticity. A product-focussed logic not a customer-centred one.

People don't necessarily want new. They want better. If your new is better then that's great, but make sure it is. All too often, new is complicated, functionally-bloated and impenetrable. Or just more expensive. Better may derive from innovation, but never forget that innovation doesn't have to be technological. It's just as likely to mean a different way of looking at what already happens.

So be careful that your focus on modernity isn't lazy marketing shorthand, underwritten with the belief that the public can be blinded with science.
You may just be revealing your technology fetish and the fact that you don't understand the true nature of the technology, the reasons why your customers do what they do and their familiarity with the concept of the emperor's new clothes.

New may well seem or indeed be different, but that doesn't mean it's a source of viable differentiation.