Change Agent - Issue 45

In an age of email and fax, do we really need to use FedEx Envelopes to send most documents? Unless a document is an original that must be signed, probably not. Yet businesses continue to use them. Why? Because the envelope (FedEx's version of the jewel box) makes it more likely that the letter will get read.

So who's in danger? How will the increasing chasm between wrappers and contents make life difficult for some companies? I think it will happen to companies in the middle, the ones that hesitate to go for the edges. Here are a couple of quick thumbnails to get you thinking about your choices.

If your company makes contents, get out of the wrapper business as fast as you possibly can. Giving away your e-book will dramatically increase the number of people who read it. More than 400,000 people have read Unleashing the Ideavirus (Do You Zoom Inc., 2000) so far -- all because I got rid of the physical stuff that makes a book expensive. If you're in the wine business, and your wine is well reviewed and has a huge following, maybe it's time to sell a special vintage directly to your customers, bypassing liquor stores and forgoing fancy bottles. Sell the wine -- not the bottle!

If you're in the wrapper business, get better at it! Beer should come in truly beautiful bottles, and those bottles should make a great noise when they are opened. Emulate the cosmetics industry in your packaging, Nordstrom in your customer service, and Apple in your sheer sexiness. Too many companies are afraid to admit that they're in the packaging business. They're happy to invest big money in a new plant, but they view spending similar money on user experience as some sort of soft expense.

Here are a couple of tests: Take a page from the New York Times, cut out a 2-inch square from it, and give that piece of paper to a friend. Odds are, she knows exactly what newspaper she's reading. Have another friend shut his eyes, get into a Mercedes-Benz, and close the door. Odds are, he'll know exactly what kind of car he is sitting in. At first glance, neither of those experiments has anything to do with the actual "products." Yet they have everything to do with them. The way that the Times looks and feels affects how I interpret the news that I read within its pages. The way that the door on a Mercedes shuts is at least as important to most drivers as the car's acceleration.

I walked into a supermarket in Saranac Lake, New York last week. It was part of a big chain, one that has some pretty upscale markets around the country. Not here, though. The lighting was poor. The shelves weren't very well arranged. I knew within five seconds that I wasn't going to make any silly, spur-of-the-moment (read: "profitable") purchases.

Of course, this supermarket, like all supermarkets, is nothing but a wrapper itself. It's a giant jewel box for food, a wrapper designed to convey packaged goods from companies that make them to consumers who buy them. A supermarket is a wrapper filled with more wrappers. And because the store's manager had stopped trying to make all that wrapping attractive, that store was leaving huge profits on the table.

I know that this idea of being packaging-obsessed seems, at first, to be superfluous and wasteful. But if you've chosen to thrive in the packaged world, then that is the path you've chosen. To go halfway down that road, to go to all the trouble of having a product, a sales force, and even real estate, and then not to finish it off by creating joy in the process for the end user -- what a waste!

The Web has really ripped a hole through the wrapping that has been sheltering the wrapper folks. On the Web, you can't hear the crinkling, see the lighting, smell the leather, or enjoy the sultry sound of a handsome salesperson's voice. The Web, the engineer's revenge, is all about content and commodities, not sexiness and wrappers. What do you do? I would do three things:

1. Make your Web site crisp, simple, and elegant -- but don't try to replicate the joy or the wonder of your wrapper. Instead, first do no harm. Go to most consulting firms' Web sites, and you'll see that it is too easy to do too much online. Get what you need from your prospect's attention -- and then stop.

2. Get permission from people to follow up with tools that support your packaging. Send them a certificate for a free test-drive of your latest BMW on a nearby racetrack, or get them to call your ace customer-service people by phone.

3. Create unique intermediate products that are either cheap or free in order to get people started with your experience. Burt's Bees worked with drugstore.com Inc. to give away a free 10-pack of its lip balms and skin creams to anyone who made a purchase on the site. If the product experience is strong enough, your effort will have been money well spent. Why? Because once I use some of Burt's stuff, I may fall in love with the experience and buy from Burt's again and again, paying handsomely for the package each time.