Quantum² Resources : Marketing & Management Tools : Packaging Information: Dress It Up and You'll Shine

Packaging Information: Dress It Up and You'll Shine

by Cynthia Lesky

Well-packaged is half sold," claims a consumer-goods industry slogan. Customers are enticed to buy a product by its attractive display, information about its features, and messages about the image of the product and of the kind of person who uses it.

The information products produced by libraries, information centers, and independent information specialists are comparable in many ways to consumer packaged goods. The product we deliver—research on demand—is unique to each client; custom-prepared and packaged for each consumer, if you will. So we stand to benefit when we package our output in a way that borrows some winning ideas from consumer products.

A Well-Designed Package
A well-designed package displays its contents in an attractive way, promotes the product's best features, and sends a message about its image. In our business, for the most part, the client is already sold on the idea of "purchasing" this particular product. The client has already commissioned us to look for information that he/she needs.

However, the value of the product that we deliver is not established in the client's mind until after it has been received and the client has made some judgments about it. Those judgments and the spillover effect of the client's estimation of quality—his/her sense of the worth of the information center, tendency to use the service again, and likelihood of recommending the service to colleagues—are determined in large part by the way the information package looks and functions.

A Functional Package
In the consumer goods industry, the marketing function of a package tends to get more attention than the original function of packaging: that is, protecting the content. In the information business, as well, the package has a function related to the content.

The idea of protecting the content does not translate well to our setting, so let's substitute the idea of making the contents more convenient and useful to the client. The information that we provide to clients is only useful to them if they can read it, understand it, and use it to inform their actions or business decisions.

By presenting—packaging—articles, reports, findings from telephone interviews and other sources in a way that showcases their usefulness, information specialists create more value. Writing executive summaries, transforming computer printouts, research notes, and photocopies into an organized and attractively formatted product not only makes the information center look good—the marketing function—but more importantly makes it possible for the client to understand the information content and perceive the value of what we found for him. To help the client achieve understanding is information "packaging" of the highest value.

A Pretty Package
Putting research results into a form that is attractive, easy to read, and easy to understand increases its value-in-use to the client in at least three ways.

• The pretty package gets more attention. In our culture, appearance is disproportionately attached to being taken seriously. Whether we're talking about personal appearance, corporate image, or the way our interoffice memos look, the entity being represented—the person, the company, the information content—receives higher quality attention if it is attractive.
  
  The ubiquity of laser printers, word processors with graphics capabilities, and spreadsheets with charting capabilities has elevated the quality of most print materials flowing through our offices. Any consultant working out of a spare bedroom can produce a report with print-shop quality. The output of the information center needs to look just as good so that its information content gets high-quality attention.
• Bumper stickers get read. Our clients often work under terrific pressure and they are bombarded with information from all kinds of sources. For these people, much of the meaning they take away from an information search may be in the bullet points prepared for our cover memos or executive summaries.
• More volume is not always more value. The ultimate value of information is realized only when its meaning is grasped. Pretty obvious, perhaps, but often we measure the success of a search on the number of articles retrieved—enough, but not too many—rather than on the relevance of their content to our client's problem. By packaging our results in a way that fosters understanding, we help the client achieve the ultimate business information product: intellience upon which they can take action.

A Valuable Package
Soon, almost anyone will be able to pull text off of a computer. And, unfortunately, chat sessions from America Online, a zillion Internat sources, or the most potent selection of items from Dialog databases basically look the same to our clients. Our critical value is in our ability to evaluate retrieval in light of specific information problems and our skill at presenting our conclusions in a way that entices the client to understanding. Let's put our precious product in the right package.