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Separating the Gift from the Wrapping

Disclaimer: I’m attempting to share something that I often find hard to explain face to face. But I feel it’s important enough for me to try. So here goes …

Let’s say it’s your birthday, happy birthday you!

You’ve just finished a wonderful dinner with your family and it’s present time — yay.

Your partner hands you a box, it’s wrapped beautifully in paper with a bow on top. You grab the box, tear away the paper to see what’s inside. Let’s hope it’s what you were wishing for!

Birthday excitement aside, I want to deconstruct this process a little bit.

The practicalities

• Inside the box: Was an object.
• Around the box: Was some paper and a bow
• Owning the box: Delivered by your partner, on your birthday

The meaning:

• Inside the box: This until opening was a secret, kept from view, it actually was totally irrelevant.
• Around the box: This created an identity for the box. It labeled it as a present. A gift for someone.
• Owning the box: When you were handed the gift, on your birthday, it became your gift.

The value:

• The object: The object is still a secret, it’s potential is its only value.
• Around the box: This is something I’ve earned, just for being born on this day – birthdays are awesome.
• Owning the box: “You remembered me on my birthday” and that makes me feel important to someone.

The next day:

• Inside the box: Is now exposed for critique, was it want I wanted, how much thought was put in, what does it do for me.
• Around the box: Is forgotten and now in the recycle bin.
• Owning the box: There an infinite link between how the box arrived, and the results of my critique.

So what the heck does all that mean …

What I’m trying (and maybe failing) to show is that your product, the wrapper you put around, and the method in which it’s delivered all play very distinct roles in the customer experience. Too often, and more often than not online, these three things get confused and merged onto one profit limiting blob.

Picking on bloggers first

A lot of bloggers I speak to consider their product to be their blog posts — I often challenge that. Bloggers are content creators, and chances are good they are writing, or speaking to deliver a specific outcome. It might be to train people on how to do something, it might be to inspire them, it might be simply to entertain. Whatever the content is designed to do, it’s the content that is a bloggers product — not a blog post.

A blog post is simply a wrapper you put around your content, and your blog platform is the way you deliver it to people.

Now web applications

When we stubble across the latest coolest web application, we are often swept up by how beautiful it is, how easy to understand the UI is. We often forget about what the application actually does. There’s typically a program underneath the UI. Some sort of function it performs to get people from point a to point b. What the application actually does is the product, the glorious UI is your wrapper, the fact it’s an app is the delivery system. A good argument for UI is that it creates a better chance of your product being used and the benefit realized — and I agree. But it’s still not your product.

The wrapper as a driver of value

When I talk value I mean how much are people willing to pay to experience what you’re offering. It might be a problem, it might be something else.

An important factor in value is market perceptions of what a certain product should cost. For a lot of things we have a subconscious range of how much something should cost based history and experience. Tighter ranges might include forms like books, wider ranges might include things like cars. When we see things above and below these ranges we’re relying on other value factors more heavily — we may even dismiss them all together.

These ranges however are driven by the products wrapper. If we look at the car range as an example. The purpose of a car is to get me from a to b. The car rapper means I can go when and where I want.  For that I expect to pay thousands.  But it’s not the only way to get from point a to point b. I can walk = free. I can catch public transport = a couple of dollars. these are different forms of essentially solving the same problem. With different value expectations for each driven only by a different method (wrapper).

How when you confuse your product with your wrapper it limits your value

Let’s first look at the case of bloggers, if you think your product is your blog posts the expected value is free. You initially start surrounding it with ads, put in the odd affiliate link and sponsored post in the mix as well. But at some point, you’re going to start to think about creating products of your own — thus the headaches will start.

Because you consider your blog post to be your product, creating a new product, one that people will pay for (an eBook for example) means that you’ll be faced with the predicament of having to create a whole bunch of unique content to form the basis of the eBook. However, if you consider your content your product, and an eBook just a wrapper, you’ll soon discover that you’ve probably already got 90% of a product already done. You just need to create that eBook wrapper and a way to deliver it.

Same goes for courses, membership programs. All just wrappers on a product you’ve probably owned for years.

Web App developers will often start building an app for a specific device or channel. Then, when they want to create a new product, go back to the drawing board looking for that the next app of the month. Whilst you re-invest from ground up, smart money may lie in putting a new wrapper on your existing application. It might me creating an integration layer for 3rd party apps (licensing). It might be expanding to different native device formats. You’re still solving the same problem with your product, just creating new value streams by putting it in different wrappers and delivering it in different ways.

Keeping your products, wrappers and delivery separate

If its building the next Facebook or simply changing the world thought your content, remember that there is a difference between what’s in the box, the wrapper you put around it, and how it’s delivered to people. Keep them separate in your mind and you’re ability to apply the same solution into different markets with unique wrappers and value propositions becomes so much easier.

And your product, just became a lot more valuable.