Change Agent - Issue 45

For the past 20 years or so, I've had a bad habit. I buy compact discs. Only one or two a week -- but one or two a week adds up. So last week, I threw out what had become my collection of more than 1,000 CDs.

Well, I didn't really throw out the CDs. I threw out the jewel boxes that the CDs came in. With the new CD changers that hold 300 CDs each (for only $250!), it's just easier to store CDs in the changer than it is to keep them in their jewel boxes.

I gathered up stacks and stacks of jewel boxes (which weighed a ton) and left them on the curb for the garbage collectors. And in the 24 hours that followed, at least a dozen people in cars pulled over, got out, and started to paw through the boxes.

It took them only a few seconds to determine that the jewel boxes were empty. But that didn't stop them: Each and every person kept pawing through the pile. They couldn't bring themselves to believe that so many CD cases, usually coveted, were now worthless. One guy even took a few of the empties with him -- for what reason I can't begin to imagine.

Of course, the jewel boxes are worse than useless without the music. They take up space, and they're not particularly attractive. Few home decorators rush out to buy jewel boxes in bulk to distribute in key locations around a house to give it that finishing touch before the photographers from Architectural Digest arrive.

Here's the question that the whole episode suggested to me: What is it about packaging -- about a wrapper -- that is so important?

Here's my answer: People are quick to attach emotional memories to packaging, all the more so when the substance within that packaging is ethereal. Anyone who has paid to put her wedding dress in storage knows what I mean. You're never going to wear it again, your kids are unlikely to want it, but you keep it because it's an important wrapper. It was the packaging around a romantic, once-in-a-lifetime -- and hard-to-recapture -- personal experience. Long after the cake has been cut and the rice has been thrown, it's the one tangible thing that you can take with you. That wedding dress is the wrapper on your wedding day, the physical manifestation of a warm and fuzzy concept.

In the old days, virtually everything had to come with some sort of wrapper. The packaging was as much a part of the product as it was a part of the brand.

As our economy continues to become more digital, the role of the wrapper becomes a vitally important concept. Some pundits riff about all products becoming services and all services becoming products. I don't think that's what it's about. I think it's about us starting to separate goods and services from their wrappers.

The music business, of course, has this very problem coming out of its ears. If first you throw out the jewel boxes, and then you throw out the polycarbonate discs, can you really charge $14 for the music? Napster is a huge threat precisely because it makes clear just how many layers of wrapping come with the music -- and just how little value such wrapping actually holds.

But it's not only in the land of the CD that we find this problem. The past few months have seen quite a kerfuffle in the book business as well. When authors can throw away the paper and the cover, charge $4 or $1 -- or nothing at all -- for a book and still profit from the exercise, it gives book publishers an excellent reason to quake. After all, publishers have organized themselves to be in the wrapper business. But if the wrapper is nothing but a lot of pre-landfill material, everyone in the book-wrapping business will have a lot of trouble making sense of their existing business.

And those are the easy examples. How about your cell-phone? Is it an irreplaceable, useful object, or just a wrapper for really valuable things such as conversations and data exchange? Tellme Networks Inc., a startup in Silicon Valley, is betting on the latter. Dial 800-555-TELL, and you can have a really fascinating phone conversation with a computer. It will look up stock information or weather, and will even dial an airline for you -- all for free. And Tellme doesn't care at all which phone you use. Phones will get cheaper and cheaper, but if Tellme does its job right, its service will become more and more valuable. In a few years, cell-phones are going to be very close to free -- a wrapper without value. What we do with them, on the other hand, will be where a ton of money stands to be made.

At the same time that we're abandoning some traditional wrappers, some businesses are becoming ever more obsessed with the wrapper. They understand that their businesses are really about wrappers, and so they offer their T-shirts, their soaps, their teas -- even their computer workstations -- in wrappers and packages that satisfy our inner need for beauty. The pleasure that we get by pulling out a Palm V when everyone around us has a IIIe is irrational. It's based on the kinesthetic joy that we get from holding the latest and greatest. That's worth something, and Palm understands its worth. Go to a Fast Company RealTime conference, and all the "irrelevant" wrapper stuff -- the uniforms, the look and feel of the place -- makes the rest of the conference that much more important and enjoyable.