The luxury good in a plastic bag

And why you should care about the way you package your communication.

Recently, I had to write a detailed email to a customer.

I answered some of his questions regarding my company's software and provided guidance to help him improve results.

My reply drew from my experience working with similar companies. When I was done, it looked like a report I'd send at the end of a short consulting gig.

What I'm implying here is how long this email was. A small litany of bullet points and over 1500 words.

And that was after severe editing to make my reply easy to parse and process.

I turned to my business partner and asked:

"Should I turn this long email into a multipage document?"

"Why would you do that?" he inquired.

"To highlight the work that went into this."

I wanted the customer to understand how much I cared about his issue. I wanted him to have a sense of the value at first glance.

Email doesn't do justice to the content.

When you buy luxury goods from Hermès or Louis Vuitton, they come in stunning, well-designed packaging.

Vuitton famously includes a dust bag.

While I recently learned that there is a market for these dust bags that you can't buy separately from a Vuitton product, this is not what the customer initially wanted to purchase.

However, it participates in the experience of the buyer.

Nobody would imagine a handbag with an exorbitant price tag delivered in a cheap supermarket plastic bag.

I ended up sending the email. The content was premium. I felt like I sent it in a plastic bag.