Fresh Perspectives
Experience Design Studio Leader and Partner
Steve Diller, who heads Cheskin Experience Design Studio, has more than 20 years of marketing research and consulting experience. Diller is responsible for driving Cheskin product innovation and media content practices. Steve serves clients as an “experience strategist,” believing that the most effective way to for companies to deepen relationships with their customers is through the development of meaningful experiences. Such experiences create the cornerstone of effective brand and product innovation, during an era of rapid technological and market change. Diller’s impressive roster of clients includes Lexmark, the Washington Post, Famous Footwear, Microsoft, and Weight Watchers. Steve Diller has also contributed to numerous books, including The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, The Principles of Trust, and Newspaper Brand Development. Steve Diller also co-owns a film production company and has produced and directed several feature films.
1 March 2007
The New York Times recently predicted the beginning of the end of "American Idol." The writer confidently anticipated that, because voting for your favorite singer is so easy, it therefore has no meaning and would soon lose any value it may have. If only he were right.
The idea that something has value to the extent that it requires sacrifice is a familiar one in economics. But, like many assumptions of the "dismal science," such as the idea of rational actors, this concept is seriously flawed.
Anthropology (and our work at Cheskin) shows that in the real world, "value" doesn't come from cost, it comes from significance. As long as people find meaning and/or entertainment in "American Idol," they're likely to vote, easy or not.
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Meaningful Experience
by Steve Diller
11 January 2006
When you try to re-imagine any practice, you generally have to re-purpose language. The reason for this is simple- all words have connotations and a history of usage that invariably reinforces earlier concepts. New ideas need new language to bring them to life.
Take "meaning" in life. We view it as "that which gives us a sense of the value of our lives." This is the conventional definition in religion, anthropology and other social sciences. Unfortunately, it's NOT the definition of the word in marketing. When marketers got their hands on this word, they generally used it as a way to express "importance" of any kind.
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Meaningful Experience
by Steve Diller
16 December 2005
When you write a book, you pay a little more attention to what other people are writing. You also pay attention to the way their books are being promoted.
We just received notice of a new book on "cult" brands that claiimed it was "the most original book on the subject ever written." That's a pretty questionable claim, of course. And even if it's true, you have to wonder about the originality of a book that's promoted using old-style, hype-oriented language to get and keep one's attention. But what's actually happening here?
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Positioning & Branding
by Steve Diller
30 November 2005
A friend recently emailed me to point out an apparent contradiction in "Making Meaning," the book I co-wrote that's out in late December, and a recent blog of mine. The blog, entitled "How Cheskin Destroyed Civilization as We Knew It," argued that Louis Cheskin came up with the idea for the modern fast food restaurant as a revolutionary "casual dining" concept. The result, eventually, was a decline in the idea of "formal" anything, dining or otherwise.
My friend noted that, in the book, we argued that business thinkers don't really invent revolutionary ideas, they just respond to what's already there.
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Meaningful Experience
by Steve Diller, 0 comments
26 October 2005
One advantage in writing a book about meaningful experiences was the opportunities it provided to plumb the depths of Cheskin's history. It's a pretty illustrious history, with engagements that often had impacts far beyond what Louis Cheskin, our founder, might have anticipated. It also has implications for all of us who work to enhance customer experiences.
A particularly interesting example was his work with McDonald's. The historical documentation indicates that, back when that company was seeking to expand more quickly, its management hit on the idea of altering the legal definition of their establishments, from "hamburger stands" to "restaurants."
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Innovation & Design
by Steve Diller
25 January 2005
As I've mentioned in an earlier entry (I think), I've been writing a book on the design of meaningful experiences with Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea. We're at the point now where the book's largely written, and we're in discussions with a few select publishers.
One of them has noted that business book publishing is "in the toilet." Apparently, the bursting of the bubble in 2001 burst much of the enthusiasm for innovative (or supposedly-innovative) ways of thinking about business practice. A "back to basics" movement, whose symptoms include such trivialities as having people wear ties again, supposedly rejects "newness" in general.
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Innovation & Design
by Steve Diller
10 August 2004
I had the dubious pleasure of some laser eye surgery last week. The design of the experience of eye enhancement has undoubtedly come a long way in the last few years.
The Nob Hill boutique I went to, plush in a mid-century style, seems designed to simultaneously create feelings of comfort and trust. That's less easy than it seems. After all, comfort and technological sophistication often appear to be near-opposites, with tech's focus on dymamism, and comfort's cushier, slower style.
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Innovation & Design
by Steve Diller
23 May 2004
I've been working on a book, in collaboration with Nathan Shedroff, on Designing Meaningful Experiences. The process of pulling our ideas together has been hugely exciting and stimulating. One key aspect of the work has involved trying to read everything I can get my hands on on design, meaning, and experience. A lot to deal with, I know.
We realized that there'd be a lot of verbiage to work through, and wasn't disappointed. Massive amounts of information are available on all three areas. What surprised me was the frequent lack of sophistication in the business arena on all three subjects, compared to the academic press.
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Innovation & Design
by Steve Diller, 0 comments
5 May 2004
Just came back from an incredible week in Shanghai. The reconstruction of the city is arguably the most important urban design initiative since the rebuilding of Paris in the 1800s. Undeniably glamorous, the new Shanghai is consciously, centrally-designed, to project an image of the ultimate in internationalism. Architecture is about as out-there as one can find anywhere. Greenbelts make the city both attractive and the most environmentally progressive in China.
In a way, the Chinese Communists have found a formula that has allowed them to become the ultimate modernists, something always promised by Marxism but rarely seen in previous Communist regimes. And yet.
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Innovation & Design
by Steve Diller, 0 comments
1 April 2004
Thomas Friedman had an interesting column in the New York Times this morning about a dilemma Mexico is facing. When the country signed NAFTA, the leadership there may have assumed that they could take advantage of free trade with the US by offering low-wage manufacturing labor to multinationals. Now, however, free trade with the rest of the world is increasingly shutting Mexican labor out of the market. Turns out China and India can compete even more effectively on labor prices.
Mexico's elite seems to have made the mistake of assuming that, in a dynamic market, they could simply select a niche for themselves and focus only on that. Meanwhile, they may have missed more enduring advantages. Just as the Indian government never realized that its training of engineers, English in the schools, and a consistent legal system could ever lead to being the back-office of the world, Mexico doesn't seem to appreciate the value of its culture in moving forward.
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by Steve Diller, 0 comments
2 September 2003
I had the privilege to be the keynote speaker at the ASTECH Conference in Vail, CO last week. ASTECH is a yearly get-together of no-nonsense newspaper executives concerned about the nuts and bolts of profitability. They're very smart people, being asked to do the impossible.
As in much of post-bubble American business, these execs are being told to obtain measurable results from any particular action they take. So, for instance, if a new advertising campaign is undertaken, the agency has to be able to show what the impact was on the paper's sales. "Put out X ads, obtain Y dollars more than you put in" is the idea.
No one can seriously argue with the goals here- to waste less money and to obtain a return on investment. On the other hand, there's a fundamental challenge when one attempts to measure the value of something removed from its context.
When an ad is placed, its impact can't be understood purely in terms of "dollars in, dollars out," because the ad doesn't operate in isolation. It's like asking what part of a car's speed is determined by its gas tank. Clearly, the tank contributes in a manner that's determined in part by its quality. But which part of the car's speed is produced by the tank alone?
Because agencies can't easily demonstrate ROI in isolation, increasing numbers of newspaper companies are dropping advertising in favor of direct marketing. There's a certain irony here, since papers are simultaneously dependent for their existence on advertising, but that's another story.
Will branding be next? Design? Ultimately, the core question revolves around whether companies in fact reap rewards from communicating meaningful characteristics about their products to consumers, if they can't be precisely measured. It would be a far greater irony if the news media became the first industry to conclude that communicating doesn't pay.
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Positioning & Branding
by Steve Diller
4 August 2003
Journalists despairing of ever attracting young adults to newspapers and magazines have been theorizing lately that one major problem is navigation. It's assumed that young people can't make sense of the organizing principle of newspapers, since they've supposedly been conditioned to look for the menu on websites.
Is menu-driven navigation truly what young people prefer? Maybe. But right now, it looks a little like a substitute for hard thinking about content. If we really want to effectively serve readers, it might be worth some investigation. It should be a simple matter to study which models of navigation are most appealing to different generations, and gravitate toward the ones that are most useful to younger people. Until that work is done, though, we'll just be speculating.
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by Steve Diller
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