When I got asked by Founders Friday, a community of founders fiercely devoted to building an inclusive founder-only space, to share my most useful marketing tactic, I shared this messaging exercise where you pretend your product fits in a box.

Enter the Build-A-Box workshop

I first learned about the workshop from Matt Hodges during our time together at Intercom but the idea originated in the book ‘Gamestorming’ by Dave Gray and Sunni Brown. I’ve lead this workshop with companies big and small (Envoy, Looker, Elation Health), for B2B and consumer products, across tech and health care industries. Everyone finds it useful no matter what they are building and what stage they are at.

And now I’m sharing it with you.

Build-A-Box is aptly named because you, well, “build a box” of core messaging for your product and company.

On an actual box.

By pretending that you’re doing marketing for a physical product with physical packaging (say, a Fitbit or an Apple computer), you are forced, due to space constraints, to distill your core messaging down to the essence. You don’t have the endless opportunity to scroll down like you do with a web landing page. You only have the real estate that are the sides of your box. Additionally, the front, back, and sides of the box force prioritization for your message.

Sometimes people try to get away with just filling out a digital template but I’m a stickler about making a physical box because the tactile nature of building it spurs creativity. Plus, the workshops where people show and pitch the box they made always leads to 10x better engagement and idea output. And it’s really fun to see people make things with their hands.

Inspiration in every day things

A large part of this workshop takes place at home, but we like to make sure it doesn’t feel like homework. We first encourage participants to look around their house (usually the kitchen) and take note of some of their favorite products. You can usually find some great marketing examples that way.

Here’s one that we found to be particularly inspiring: Sir Kensington’s Avocado Oil Mayonnaise (who knew!).

Sir Kensington’s Mayonnaise

Made with 100% avocado oil (You hass to try it—see what they did there?).
Free range eggs (The best for your nest).
A squeeze of lime juice (Zest to impress).
No artificial ingredients (It’s all good.)

Isn’t that messaging crisp and fresh? So little real estate and it doesn’t even matter. Sir Kensington has told you everything you need to know for buying this mayo and why it will be delicious. Sold!

Cheerios

Here is one more classic example we like to share: Cheerios.

Isn’t that descriptor in the bottom left — “Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal” — just so…clear? So often we muddle our message by trying to sound clever (innovative! collaborative! AI!) but there is something to be said for describing what you do and how you do it without any extra jargon, complexity or flowery language. Notice the benefit/outcome statement “can help lower cholesterol” and the features list of ingredients on the side.

When you break it down, product copy for cereal and software isn’t all that different.

Building your box

Armed with that inspiration, the other part of the take-home assignment is to find a box around the house, some markers, some paper, scissors and tape, and set aside an hour to get creative.

Then it’s time to dig into the questions.

Front of the box:

Descriptor

What does this product or company do?

Headline

What’s a compelling headline that will make the buyer want this product?

Image

What’s a compelling image to stop people in their tracks and say, hey, i need this product?

Sub-head

This is a very brief problem statement followed by specifically how your product solves it.

Benefits/outcomes

Key benefits/outcomes and descriptions (aim for four and they might have to go on the sides depending on your box size and shape).

At this point, if think about it, you’ve essentially figured out the top part—the hero—of your landing page as well as the middle part of page with these benefit/outcome statements. I know we’re using a physical box to get your creative juices going but ultimately, this will make up your messaging on your website, one 2-pagers, and pitch decks. Isn’t it an effective to get some new copy ideas? We think so.

From here, you’ll turn your box over by answering things like your key features, your ideal testimonial, and any key capabilities that might be different from features.

Back of the box:

Ideal testimonial

In a perfect world, what would your ideal buyer say about your product?

Features

What are the product capabilities? What can I do with it?

Pitching your box

By this point, you are so proud of your box and you think it’s the best thing to be invented since Cheerios that you can’t wait to get to the workshop. We get it. We feel the same when we make our own boxes! That’s why we give our participants five minutes to pitch their box and share why it’s better than all the other boxes.

This is always a fun discussion because even though you’re proud of your own box, you get inspired by others’ boxes too and it makes you realize that there are so many ways to handle messaging and copy for your product and company.

Once everyone has presented, we go back around and have a final conversation as a group of what we like and don’t like about all the boxes so we can get to some sort of consensus and, ultimately, the “one build-a-box to rule them all.”

How Build-A-Box leads to great messaging

The beauty of this workshop is you’ll get alignment and consensus on key messaging themes before you ever write any website copy. And you might even discover some dark horse copywriters in your ranks.

Also, you can include more stakeholders in the conversation than might be on the project team managing the website or landing page, which we find helps with the review process down the road. And we’ve said it a few times now, but this forces brevity and creativity in a way that’s hard to replicate when you have a long Google doc or landing page that you think you need to fill.

If you’d like deliverable-driven marketing tactics and templates like the Build-A-Box workshop, plus get expert feedback in Slack, sign up for The Founder’s Marketing Playbook.

To craft great messaging, pretend your product fits in a box