Exercise for the relationally anemic.

The business of selling class personalized stationary ... is gaining momentum after a period of stagnant sales ... sales have risen more than 20% in the past year ... Personalization is enormous ... it's sort of a rebellion to the impersonal nature of communicating electronically

--The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2007

Personalization is not for everyone nor is it for every situation. Many of us are pleased to check out of our hotel, order our books or retrieve our bank balances online, and conduct any number of other transactions without a personal interaction. In fact, many of us delight in being able to do certain things without any human contact because--face it--human interaction takes effort and consumes energy.

However, as a society we must admit that things continue to change dramatically. The rate at which automated, self-serve, electronic, human-less transactions continue to replace human interactions is incredible. Compared with our parents and grandparents who primarily conducted their life's transactions with people they knew--bank, grocery store, car repair--we primarily conduct our business with people we don't know and increasingly without people at all (strangers and nonhumans). In fact when things went wrong, we used to say, "I want to talk with someone down there I know." That then morphed into "I want to talk with a human--no doubt, a stranger--down there." Then as things moved offshore we conceded again, "Is there a stranger in a foreign land on the other side of the world whom I can barely understand--that I might talk to?" We have really lowered the bar.

The rise of emotion-saving devices

Just this morning on one of those morning shows they were demonstrating this electronic robot with a face and even large expressive eyes as a relational tool for friendship. Ah, yet another way to avoid the heavy lifting of relationships in our lives. This new world first brought us labor-saving devices like lawn mowers, washing machines and electric irons. Now it is bringing us emotion-saving devices so we don't have to wear ourselves out with face-to-face or even phone conversations with other humans.

Those labor-saving devices worked out really well. They made us more efficient, productive and ultimately more wealthy. However, they did not make us healthier. We became physically soft, weak and too often overweight. It turns out that when we no longer needed to perform the physical work, we still needed the physical exercise. In fact, many of us use a portion of the time we have saved with all of all of the labor-saving devices to ... go to the gym and work out.

It appears we may be headed down the same track with our relationships. Certainly we can continue to eliminate human interactions and get our stuff done--often more quickly and more efficiently. However, apparently efficiency of eliminating interactions is increasingly leaving us relationally soft and weak. It turns out that we may need the relationships more than we needed to get the transactions done. We need personalization because of that root word--we need engagement with the "person."

Dr. Henry Lodge of Columbia Medical School and co-author of "Younger Next Year" linked the physical and the relational to life and death: Anger, stress and loneliness are signals for "starvation" and chronic danger. They "melt" our bodies as surely as sedentary living. Optimism, love and community trigger the process of growth, building our bodies, hearts and minds.

I believe we as a society are learning that we need relational exercise and exertion just as we need physical exercise. This insight is evidenced by pent-up demand for authentic, personalized and, yes, difficult, human interaction that leads to strong relationships.

Why handwritten notes are becoming popular

When will we finally get it that "personalization"--notice the root word--requires the engagement of a "person"? I can't tell you have many failed attempts I have observed in the past 10 years, usually involving technology, to trick a people into believing that someone knows them and is trying to reach out to them--when in fact it is a software program. As a result, the great majority of customers have come to discount most physical and electronic communication from providers as "junk."

So it is not surprising that the personalized handwritten notes are now the way forward because they are one of the few remaining communication modes that are not considered tricked up or impersonal. Although I admit to examining them very carefully to ensure we have not been duped by some printing slight of hand. This trend is simply a signaling device to tell us just how discounted, irrelevant and anemic our communication has become in meeting the human, relational needs of our market.

The increased purchase of personalized stationery is evidence that people are reading and responding to this signal. They have already purchased their workout equipment and are headed to the gym for a good relationship workout. It would not be a good time for our customers to get ahead of us.

Robert Hall is author of "The Street Corner Strategy for Winning Local Markets." E-mail: [e-mail]