Revenge of the analogue?

Every year, I do an annual holiday with my oldest childhood friends. A ‘girls only’ holiday, no partners or kids. It’s definitely one of the highlights of my year. Last year, one of my friends brought some of the letters we had written to each other when we were teenagers. We read the letters aloud to each other, all of us often convulsing in fits of laughter. Oh, the angst of being 18, our ability to make mountains out of molehills and the all-important self-aggrandizement.

The smell of the old letter paper, the faded and splotchy ink on the page and the now-obsolete aerograms brought back a flood of memories.

We may never see the rise of the handwritten letter again, but we are starting to see a new dance with the analogue: the resurgence of vinyl records, the soaring sales of moleskin notebooks and even the revival of film, as in film for your camera. Interestingly, this isn’t just fuelled by the nostalgia of middle-aged customers but actually driven by a new breed of younger consumers.

David Sax, in Revenge of the Analogue: Real things and why they matter, explains, ‘surrounded by the digital, we now crave experiences that are more tactile, and human centric.’

This isn’t a call to embrace our inner ‘Luddite,’ for those of us who still have one, that is. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s a recognition that big business has thrown out the analogue baby with the bathwater. So, when we design high-tech digital strategies, what are some high-touch analogue things we can do for our customers? Every business definitely needs a digital strategy, but, if you were to map an analogue strategy, what would it look like?

Please comment; I would love to hear from you!