Packaging Is the Answer
by Steven Goldstein
When new technology or dramatic innovation is applied to an industry,
tremendous growth typically follows. The supply of the industry's goods and services often rises substantially, thereby lowering prices and increasing demand.
Examples of this are everywhere. The agriculture revolution changed rural America from small, vertically integrated farms producing small quantities of a wide range of products to large, factory-like establishments producing tremendous quantities of very few products. The entire chain of food production became specialized, with the last link in the chain being packaging. Progress in food packaging gave consumers practically unlimited choices in food types and combinations.
While we have been living in the information age for many years, the information revolution was brought upon us by the emergence of the Internet. The supply of information or content available to information consumers has increased hundredfold in the past five years as access to the World Wide Web has become universal. At the start of the revolution, industry analysts declared, "content is king" and that owners and creators of content would control the direction and profits of the budding, yet powerful media.
In many ways, what actually happened paralleled what occurred in the agricultural revolution. The supply of information, especially in the consumer space, rose incredibly. But supply clearly outpaced demand, driving the price of once valuable information to practically zero. With low barriers to entry, everyone published something. Most published products were pushed onto web pages without any thought whatsoever to packaging.
In the business or professional information arena, similar analogies apply. Prior to the information boom, creators of information were vertically integratedthey collected and processed information, formatted it, developed applications to analyze it, and distributed it all by themselves. Just as in agriculture, the information industry has seen rampant consolidation. Some players have grown by acquisition, while others have grown organically to dominate various market segments.
The notable difference between agriculture and information is that packaging in food products is far ahead of information packaging in both sophistication and variety. The benefits of better information packaging have yet to reach the business information consumer. Although a much broader swath of information is now free to users via the World Wide Web, the free information is so poorly packaged and its accuracy so hard to assess that it is often ignored by information professionals.
Why the slow start? Prior to the Web, electronic information consumers operated as specialists. Lawyers, for instance, had their own libraries, their own content sources, and their own librarians to operate them. Pharmaceutical companies also had their own information specialists, many with scientific credentials.
The democracy of the Web created a growing society of information generalists whose absence of credentials does not hinder their access to basic legal or pharmaceutical information. Law firms publish freely on their own sites with the objective of marketing the firm's services to viewers. As the availability of information continues to grow, the difficulty of finding the good stuffthe gems among the rocksalso increases, along with the pressure of competition to find those gems. How information is collected, filtered, and packaged is as significant to success as the information itself.
Packaging is manifested in many ways: format, solutions, and integrations of content sets. Packaging can improve searching capabilities and per unit pricing, expedite the delivery of information, and the relationships between content sets.
Better packaging provides more options for the information consumer, including more choices of content, pricing, and simpler combinations of content and formats. Identical information can meet the needs of disparate users, depending on how the information is packaged.
A new formula has emerged, one that renders greater convenience, more choices, better pricing, and higher utility. Specialization within agriculture provided benefits to every part of the food chain. The information industry, too, will witness more sophistication as long-sought improvements through packaging are realized. Content is most meaningful and usable when it is derived from a substantial base and is packaged and sorted with the customer in mind. Packaging renders results that are precise and sensibly organized, which is just what the user seeks.
Steven Goldstein is co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Alacra, Inc.
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