Sell Package, Not Product

When production becomes cheaper and more accessible, it is less about what gets produced, and more about its packaging.

Packaging is the metaphorical “box” for your product. It is not just a physical wrapper, but all of the other “contextual wrappers” that stage your product to be perceived and valued by customers. A product package is its brand and affiliations, stories and meaning, style and aesthetics, price and promotion, use cases and function, placement and presentation, etc.

The same product can be packaged in multiple different ways, and be valued differently to different people. This is often the case in beauty, where one manufacturer will simultaneously service a luxury brand and discount brand, using the same raw ingredients, and same production methods. That same formulation positioned in the luxury package will have a significantly higher price tag than the discount package, despite it being the exact same thing.

Your package is what you sell - not your product.

The secret that the best marketers share is that they understand where value is created - not in the physical world, but in the minds of customers.

Value is not inherent to any object. It is assigned through interpretation, in our minds. Marketers can make something more valuable by changing the mind’s conception of it, independent of the thing changing itself.

What we sell to customers is the “interpretation stack”, not the physical bundle. The physical bundle (what it is, what it is for, what it is worth) will be derived in the minds of the customer from the interpretation stack you provide them with.

The role of the marketer is therefore to package product in a way that can be interpreted by customers. It should make it easy for products to be captured, perceived, and valued in the way they are intended to be.

The elements that compose your packaging (e.g. brand, stories, placement, use cases, etc.) are the building blocks your customer will use to interpret your product.

You can provide them with as many or as little building blocks as you want - just know that what you don’t define, your customer will define for you. Customers have an automatic “autocomplete” mode in their minds. They generate images of brands, products, and people from the inputs they have available.

If your core building blocks are clear and consistent, your customer’s autocomplete function will most likely be well informed to complete the picture. If your building blocks are messy and ambiguous, your customer’s autocomplete function risks producing incoherent images. This may cause customers to value your product in the wrong way, or cause fragmentation in word-of-mouth.

Customers need to be exposed to the same message multiple times for it to register, and for the right heuristics to be associated. If your customers all produce different images of your product in their minds, they will most likely communicate it differently to others. When narrative is fragmented, it doesn’t scale. You need your narrative to be unified and cohesive to benefit from the effects of repeated exposure.

Packaging is never one thing, and is never static. You can create numerous variations with new formats or combinations. This can include content that prompts new applications, personas telling your story in new ways, graphics that inspire different emotions, experiences that prompt new associations, and more.

Getting creative with your packaging is how you expand your market. By framing your product in different contexts and in different styles, you reach different people and inspire different use cases.

Your packaging is your "interpretation design". You can craft it deliberately. That is what a Marketer does, and what you can do too - for products, or anything else.

The great thing about packaging is that it is free from physical constraints. It can be constantly reimagined and reinvented. One product can be packaged in infinite ways. What this means in practice is that one product can create an infinite number of products. The packaging is what you sell.

This is why I love marketing so much. You can derive as many “mind products” as you want from one or a limited number of “real products”. It is an infinite game that never ends. If you love the game, you can play endlessly.