Packaging Your Invisible Box

3. Physical Packaging–The images you present in a physical form that create beauty and cause your prospects and clients to trust you.

4. Procedural Packaging–The experiences you deliver to your clients that deliver on the promises you make, enhance your integrity and enable your business to grow.

To do packaging properly, you must integrate these elements or your packaging falls apart. For example, you might communicate your concepts clearly, but if your story is boring (no BIG Idea) people are not going to listen or remember. Or, you could have a really great BIG Idea, but if your physical packaging is unappealing, no one is going to believe in you, or take you seriously. Moreover, if you don't deliver the right experiences, and make good on your promises, your reputation will deteriorate, and foster a negative brand in a diminishing number of clients' hearts and minds.

Your BIG Idea: Something new, better, and different

Packaging a brand for your Invisible Box begins with a BIG Idea, something new, better and different. Without a BIG Idea, your brand and your packaging, no matter how brilliantly executed, will not make a lasting and positive impression on your clients.

To help clarify this point, go to Google and type in "financial services" or "financial advisor."

How many search results did you get? Did you get 1,000, perhaps 10,000, or maybe a million? That's pretty typical. No matter what your business, in the age of the Internet and globalization, your prospects have thousands of companies to choose from. As a result, if the basic idea of your business is generally the same as hundreds of other companies, it is very hard to get noticed or be singled out as special.

That's why you need to develop a BIG Idea as the first step in the packaging process. You need to determine what you can do – something new, better, and different – that helps you stand out in a crowd. Your BIG Idea needs to be new – something people haven't heard before. It needs to be better – by solving problems, or meeting needs, or reducing complexity – something not previously offered in your industry. And it needs to be different – not just a little different from your competitors, a lot different.

Conceptual packaging: Telling an interesting story people understand

At a recent conference, we offered a free 15-minute session to help individual attendees upgrade their elevator speech, the 30-second verbal statement that describes what they do.

As we worked with more and more people, a clear pattern emerged. They either had a very simple, boring elevator speech: "I sell life insurance," or they had a long, convoluted, and often incomprehensible one: "We are wealth integrators who offer a grid of proprietary technology to meta-optimize our clients' return-on-asset ratios."

In both cases, they were frustrated because they weren't getting the results they wanted. They were not engaging the interest of their prospects.

This "failure to communicate" results from a failure to package concepts in the first place. Because there are so many things you want to say, and concepts you want to incorporate, the components of your story swirl around in your head like a tornado. We call this The Concept Tornado.

Being a victim of The Concept Tornado is one of the most common maladies in our new economy. As a financial professional, you are trying to bring together ideas and concepts, but because they come from many different sources, these concepts all too often collide and conflict with each other.

Our experience at the conference really drove home the importance of conceptual packaging: You must take all your ideas, thoughts, stories, advice, and concepts and create a story that is easy to say and understand, and, is above all interesting.

If you think about how relationships with prospects begin, you know there is a fundamental need for understanding. We want the people hearing or reading our story to understand what we are talking about. This understanding then leads to the ultimate goal of conceptual packaging, which is engagement. If your prospects understand what you are saying, you will have the best chance of engaging their attention, which in turn creates an opportunity for further, more in-depth dialogue. They have a chance to learn more about you, and you have a chance to learn about them.

If you don't yet think the need to package your concepts is more critical than ever consider this: It is estimated that the average North American is exposed to more than 3,000 sales and marketing messages per day. If your story is boring, unclear, hard to explain and hard to understand, how will you break through this torrent of competing messages and engage the interest of your prospects?

Bill Bishop and CONTACT _Con-3E119BBC1 c s l Curtis Verstraete are, respectively, CEO and president of Bishop Information Group Inc., Toronto, Ont. You can e-mail them at, respectively, and .