Differentiating By Design: The First Impression Is The Only Impression

The book looked great. The finishing was perfect. Now for the delivery method.

It was time to send out copies of Secrets To Dominate Your Niche to the media and we were thinking of a creative way to package the book so that it made an impression. We had come so far from the very first day we wrote the first word of the book. We couldn’t afford to throw it all away in one lame first impression. After all, in Chapter 9 of the book: Differentiate By Design, the authors shared on the importance of communicating your company’s difference, positioning and corporate values through your brand identity. So of course we had to walk the talk!

We had the idea of stuffing the book inside a rich black velvet bag (similar to those used for high-end, limited edition whisky bottles) and have real money sticking out the top of the bag. There were two problems with this idea though. How do we find the right size and right material for the bag? And would the real money look too gimmicky; or worse, constitute as a bribe!!??

Anyway, we searched high and low for the bag. We explored different options of making the bag. In the end, family members came to the rescue. Sant’s family in Bali helped us source for the materials and created our dream bag based on a sketch we sent to them and some images of whisky bottle bags we found online.

Some of the bag images we sent to Sant’s family

We only gave Sant’s family one week to source, produce and courier the bags over to us. But before they went into full production of the bags, they emailed us a sample of how it looked like so that we could make any changes if necessary.

Sadly though, they informed us that there simply wasn’t enough time to add the dollar sign and the three “catch words” Outwit, Outsell, Outperform, on the bag. We were happy to have gotten everything else that we requested for, including that beautiful golden tassle to secure the bag. Then it was a one week wait for the bags to arrive.

When we got our hands on the bag, it was another ‘love at first sight’ moment. We decided to do up a sample package just to see how it would look with the book inside it and stuffed with bubble wrap.

But when it came time to do up the actual packing for the books in the bag, Thomas’ staff came up with truly wonderful ideas on how to spruce up the design. As the two authors were busy signing the books, one of his staff was fiddling around with the tassle to come up with a nicer knot. Then another one of his staff suggested printing the hand image on the book cover, laminating it and hanging it on the tassle so that it dangled on the front of the bag!

That was one fantastic suggestion because by then, we had thrown out the idea of stuffing the bag with real money. (It would have looked inproportionate because of the size of the bag and we still weren’t sure whether it would be ‘legal’ to have that.) Furthermore, the laminated image created a greater impact and it served a useful purpose as well: it could be used as a book mark and was a physical reminder of the Secrets To Dominate Your Niche cover.

I’m sure you will agree after looking at the photos below:

And so as you can see, just the simple act of packaging the books to be delivered to the media people took a whole lot of thought and effort. But I’m sure if you were one of the recipients of that package, you would have been curious and suitably impressed, woudn’t you? Let us know your thoughts on this.

More importantly, I hope you got an insight into the work that went into the whole branding and marketing of this book, just from this story on packaging. We also did a whole lot of other materials just for the launch that’s happening on 22 April. Take a look at some of them below:

Eugene modelling the STDYN T-shirts

Testing out how the Banners would look on the launch night at Thumper

Letterhead and Invitation card

And a whole lot more! But I’ll leave that for another time, perhaps when I have the time to take more photos.