Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Experiences

The idea that companies can and should play a meaningful role in their customers’ lives may sound grandiose to some, even socialistic to others, but it came to us quite simply and naturally. We looked around and noticed people were talking more frequently and passionately about meaning in their lives. We heard people expressing a desire for—even expecting—meaningful experiences from companies, not just from traditional institutions such as religion, family, or government.

Learn more. Read Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences. Also available in ebook form.

Our belief in the validity and viability of this business strategy also stems from our conversations with business leaders. Most have exhausted the benefits of earlier approaches and are investigating new approaches. More often than not, when they explain what is missing from their current innovation practices, the lack centers around the need for a deeper understanding of customers, a less linear, more collaborative routine, and a heightened sensitivity to the power of design.

Filling the Gap

Addressing this emerging desire for meaning is innovation’s newest challenge, one that requires a focus on experience design and a highly collaborative development process. But the pay-off is significant:

For businesses, it offers a new avenue for creativity and a new manner for a company to distinguish itself. Line extensions or brand remakes can become more expansive and significant, going beyond a simple upgrade or a new flavor. Products and services can better complement each other, and leverage other components like distribution channels, promotional activities and brand to strengthen a company’s overall offering.
An emphasis on meaningful experiences offers new means for a company to add value to existing customer relationships and make those relationships more stable and enduring. Rather than constantly fighting to keep customers through price cuts or the addition of new features, a company can gain a more protected position within their customers’ lives—a position that promotes growth.
If you identify the core meanings that your product, service, or brand convey, you are more capable of translating the experience into multiple cultures—again, a timely and reasonable pursuit, given our increasingly globalized economy.
By adopting a design process that emphasizes a consumer focus and that intentionally integrates all aspects of an experience, innovation teams can orchestrate collaboration in a way that benefits customers, employees and their company as a whole.

Giving and Getting More

Meaningful experiences add value because they touch on ideals and beliefs we hold dear, but they do more than this. Because a meaningful experience depends on repeated, consistent delivery, it typically engenders greater trust. As customers’ trust in a company deepens, their loyalty becomes stronger. They adopt a more informal relationship with the company, one that eases transactions on both sides, making them faster, better and more predictable.

In short, innovating with a goal of meaningful experiences adds value for the customer and for the company.