As reading becomes an activity that doesn't require physical books, and as bookstores are disappearing into the clouds, one would assume no sane company would invest in making book vending machines. Luckily, life is full of surprises.
At the 15th e-Book Expo in Tokyo, a company called Glory was showcasing their latest innovation: an e-book vending machine. See the picture below, from a Japanese source.
The idea is that you choose a book from the screen, pay to receive a receipt with a QR code, which you can read with your mobile phone to download the e-book to your phone. Simple enough.
The article mentions that no registration is required to buy books, and that the possibility to pay with cash are the merits of this vending machine. Fair enough, but it seems very counter-intuitive to develop something physical for goods that are completely digital.
The fact that you need your smart phone eventually to download the book makes you wonder why a user wouldn't start with browsing on his phone in the first place. That made me come up with actually another merit of the vending machine: its big screen. It's probably more convenient to browse for books on a bigger screen.
Would this work? Would this machine increase sales of e-books? I think so. To understand why, you would have to see this clip about some innovation in retail in South Korea:
You may have seen it already. It goes to show that offline product confrontations are great triggers for people to start spending money. The e-book vending machine, through its physical presence combined with ease of use through an intuitive UI, may become a great success as well.
What can we learn from this? I think it is that relying on online marketing only may not always be a sufficient strategy. Combining it with offline efforts to invite potential customers to interact with your product offering, that might be a better way to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment