On Monday Christmas came and went and wrapping paper flew through the living rooms of households worldwide. Packaging something and putting a shiny bow on it is sure delightful… and marketers know it. But what if you’re not a product-based business? How can you package your worth?
Whether or not we realize it, we have been packaging information since the beginning of time. If we didn’t, people would drive on the wrong side of the road, eat dessert before dinner, and walk into an elevator before others walk out. We, as humans, love rules and order.
We also love processes and procedures. We are secretly mad at our grandma when she refuses to write down the family recipe in her head because it serves no purpose in her head if we want to make it on our own. It’s a present without a bow… a product without a package.
If you are a service provider or a professional who works with policies, processes, information, or procedures, I welcome you to start writing some recipes of your own. In marketing, we call these frameworks… and if you have a particularly good one, you might want to copyright or trademark it. What are the three to five key steps you take to make life better for your ideal customer, boss, or colleagues? Frameworks take ideas in your head (that have no value to your consumers there) and package them into valuable pieces of intellectual property.
Six Sigma, for example, follows the DMAIC process (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) to improve efficiency, and professionals pay a lot of money to get certified in the process. This process is now a well-known strategy but it started as an idea in someone’s head.
How can you turn your ideas or your business processes into a framework? Bonus points if you can make the acronym a word like STOP or FIRST or use alliteration (same starting letter for each step). For example, when I teach the marketing funnel in my corporate training program, I use a process I named the “Four C’s” (Curate, Create, Convert, Continue). I also teach people how to LEAD with their content… but more on that another day.
Now get busy and go put a package and bow on top of all that knowledge hidden in your head. You don’t even need scissors, tape and wrapping paper. Your computer will do just fine.
