Repetition bias refers to the common human tendency to place more confidence in beliefs that are repeated often. One such belief is that everything is moving online and that traditional ways of doing business are therefore close to extinction. One data point supporting this notion is that about 70% of the world’s population now owns a smartphone. However, here are a few counterpoints that demonstrate the risk in blindly accepting these oft repeated blanket statements.
Remember the Amazon Effect which predicted that traditional retailers would be decimated by ecommerce? I recently asked several friends to estimate the percentage of retail sales that are online, and the range of responses was 60-80%. The actual number is 16% which is exactly where it was during the pandemic when we were all homebound. Another belief is that most of us are conducting all of our financial business on personal devices. Well, only about 11% of life insurance policies and 3% of annuities are sold online, and a mere 1% of financial advice is delivered electronically. What about banking? Sixty-five percent of consumers use traditional rather than online banks for their primary bank accounts. Finally, many perceive that streaming has replaced traditional television. Well, streaming represents 36% of all TV usage.
We are still in the early innings of the tech transition so it is reasonable to expect these percentages to rise. However, three conclusions come to mind. First, humans are generally comfortable with familiar routines so adopting new ways of doing business frequently develops more slowly than one might expect. Second, there is nothing particularly interesting about the status quo so articles predicting radical change make for more interesting reading. Finally, we should not discount the importance of human interaction in our choices of products and services.