Pills And The Magic Of Packaging

People don’t like pills. They’re hard to swallow, come in confusing bottles, with even more complicated ingestion instructions. That said, it used to be worse.

Companies like Apple invest a lot of time packaging their products. Why? Think of it this way - if you walked into a three-star restaurant, and your food was served on a piece of cardboard, it’d kind of ruin the whole vibe. Thus, packaging becomes a critical continuation of the customer experience, one in which many companies choose to cut corners. Shame.

Old school medicine used to be taken via spoon, and tasted awful. Then, some clever white-coat figured out you could cram all the benefits into one easy-to-pop dose. No more nasty tasting syrups, just a small capsule that dissolves once it's in your body. Some pills are even sugar-coated to make the experience more pleasant.

Medicine isn't the only thing. Ideas need packaging. Pitches, presentations, grant proposals, essays, all these things are important, yet people just send them off without thinking about packaging. Take philosophy, Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, "the ideas speak for themselves", they say. If you’re part of the lucky few with the time and education to digest said material that's wonderful, but for the majority, there just isn’t enough energy to power through all those pages, thus life-changing ideas are lost.

Now look at The School of Life website. They’ve taken philosophy and repackaged it to be more approachable, hitting the nail on the head, and providing great value by saving time.

Quality matters. But good content easily gets buried. It needs a way to break through the noise, to be "digestible". Next time you’re about to ship something, think through the entire customer experience. What does it feel like to unzip your product or idea. Is it a pleasant experience?

Great packaging evokes feeling. It’s an extension of the idea itself. Don’t feed people horrible-tasting medicine. Take the necessary time to make it enjoyable for the customer. If you nail it, they’ll be hungry for more.