5. Your Brand Is Not Your Logo
Why your brand is not what you say it is—How your brand is an experience that lives in your customer’s gut—The role of design in brands built to last—How to communicate what your brand is about.
A road-weary family of five climbs out of a Volvo station wagon and heads past the dance hall that won’t be open for three more hours toward the post office/saloon that also serves as a souvenir store and is the main business in downtown Luckenbach, a metropolis comprised of four wooden buildings that haven’t seen fresh paint in years. Mom, Dad, the twin girls, and their older brother Chip are nearly to the door, anxious to see the place Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Gary P. Nunn, and a host of other country-western singers have all proclaimed as "the" place to go if you are traveling through Texas.
Then they hear the rumble. The deep-throated growl of twenty odd V-Twin engines heading their way. Around the bend they come, two wheels each and glittering in the sun. "Holy, Hunter S. Thompson," Dad yells. "It’s the Hell’s Angels." Mom clutches the kids close.
From the other direction, half again as many bikers come down from the western turn of the drive. Mom and Dad tremble some, and at least two of the kids eye the nearby outhouse longingly. Then something surreal happens.
The bikers pull up, one by one, in a row, their bikes organized and shining. The riders kill the engines, climb off one-by-one, and as each one dismounts, he or she is greeted by others. They hug, kid each other, and compare bikes. The insignia on each bike proclaims it is a Harley-Davidson—the same insignia adorning most jackets, hats, and shirts. Many riders display Harley-Davidson tattoos. It turns out one group is from Tyler, another from Brownsville, while a sprinkling of another group from Waco has mingled in. There is a lot to discuss and share. These riders are not anything close to being a destructive biker gang; they are part of a brotherhood of the road. The family relaxes, aware they are as safe as they would be at a Kiwanis meeting. Their mood shifts to excitement and curiosity, and in that they have something in the bikers. Young Chip feels a tingle in his stomach that might lead him to one day buy a Harley himself.
Few brands have taken on as much of a life of their own as has that of the Harley. Long since the days of movies such as Wild One and Easy Rider, the Harley has become a revered American icon, standing for the spirit of letting the wind rip through your hair (or across your helmet) on the open road, living free and proud, and feeling the road sweep through every part of you with your senses fully alive. Now, compare that to sitting on the couch with chips and a beverage until the cushions take the shape of your body.
Few could have predicted the bike once known as the Harley "hog," a bad boy’s bike, would become the stuff of spontaneous camaraderie for a widely divergent group of individuals who have in common a passion to ride the highways and the backroads of America on two wheels. While there may be sleeker bikes or faster bikes, they all want to do their riding on this bike. Picture Malcolm Forbes on the back of his Harley beside Liz Taylor on the one he bought for her. Yes, the Harley has come a long way. But allow yourself no confusion here. The classic Harley-Davidson logo is not the company’s brand. Instead, the brand is alive in the psyches of all who just rode into town in Luckenbach; it’s also alive in those who buy Harley pajamas for their two-year-old; and it’s alive in the desire for all those window and bumper stickers, even (especially) the tattoos. The Harley brand is alive in the guts of its customers.
No one knows that more than William G. Davidson, vice president of styling at Harley and grandson of William Davidson, one of the founders. Willie G., as he is known, oversees the design of every Harley model. The classic V-Twin engine is one of the unique aspects he most treasures. But the bike has by no means stayed the same. Every year the company is on the move to incorporate improvements, but without altering the classic look and feel of the bike. A lot of the changes come directly from customer feedback, and the "staying close to the customer" policy comes easy because, as Willie G. puts it, "All the folks at Harley are riders themselves."
Every detail of the Harley stores and merchandise reflects the quality of premium craftsmanship and embodies the lifestyle of the Harley biker. Yes, there might be faster bikes and quieter bikes, but while competition is selling a product, Harley is more than aware it is selling a lifestyle. With revenues of more than $1 billion, the company spends a little less than $2 million a year on advertising. The company also encourages events such as the annual Harley Toys for Tots ride through Martha’s Vineyard and other locations.
Was the evolution of Harley a conscious plan from the beginning? Probably not. But they are certainly aware of where their brand lives now, and they nurture that with everything they have. Yes, they know where their brand lives, and that wouldn’t be Harley headquarters, they know it lives at its best in the riders, out on the open road. Their goal is to keep it all fresh and in step with technological innovation, yet still traditional in look and feel.
The Living Nature of a Brand
A number of brands have taken on a life of their own, like a batch of sourdough mix—bubbling and alive. Managers of the brand have either learned to roll with that, to adjust and go with the flow, to make something of the best of all that, or have stumbled and the brands have languished or disappeared. When Ivy League students decided it was "camp" to start wearing the rubber-soled boots and rough outdoorsy jackets of sporting good companies like L.L. Bean and Abercrombie & Fitch, it didn’t take long for those firms to see the light and exchange limping sales in trout flies and snowshoes for the market support of the customer group with the most disposable income who wanted to join "the club."
What is going to become extremely important for your company is the role of what’s been labeled the brand manager. It’s basically the person who holds the keys to the quality of customer experience, of what people see and feel and interact with. A recurring theme in this book is that you need to design your process and infrastructure around what your end user sees and feels and experiences, and then go out and make sure your system supports all this. It gets more and more complicated as you’re developing a product and your design is done in San Francisco, and your engineering is done in Taipei, your manufacturing is done by another company in China, there’s yet another company providing the packaging, and then someone else is doing the logistics, and so on.
In this expanded role, a new skill set has to develop where an individual or individuals are really chartered with holding, protecting, and developing that experience, and always making sure to remember that your customer doesn’t care about your supply chain, doesn’t care how sophisticated or how well-leveraged you are. The customers care about what they want. And what they want is a great experience of feeling more alive. If wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch hooded sweatshirt that costs three times as much as the one they can get at Wal-Mart makes them feel more like they belong to their peer group, so be it. The gut has spoken.
Your Brand Communicates
Brand and branding, for the most part, are really overused terms, and by many people they are completely misunderstood. When you say brand, too many people think logo, think about what their advertising is, what their corporate identity looks like, or what their packaging or retail presence looks like. Worse, some get caught up in what their competitors are saying and how their product or service fits when compared against that. When we started working with MasterCard over a decade ago, they were obsessed with what Visa was up to. You get in that kind of mindset and right away you start doing a lot of externally focused stuff instead of listening to the dialogue between the product and the customer. MasterCard began a new dialogue about what business they were in. The comment got made that while you can’t use your MasterCard to buy happiness, you can use it for most everything else. This lead to the Priceless campaign. MasterCard repositioned the brand as a portal to "priceless" experiences. The rest as they say, is history.
It begins with dialogue (fr. Gk dialogos: flow of meaning). Listen in, for example, and see if you can hear the promise Apple makes to the customer, because, believe us, that’s the beginning of the journey for an established successful brand. It starts with a promise that has meaning to the customer. And it is a promise that must be kept.
When you first see pictures of an iPhone, it starts giving you information. When you read about it, you get more information. As soon as ads start appearing, you get more information. When you first look at and touch it, you add to all you have gathered. If you buy it and experience how it works, you’ve added still more—to what you were able to gather; you have added personal-level emotional experience to the mix. With all this, you have been building up an idea of what the iPhone is and what it might mean to you. Before you ever bought it, you had a certain context of expectations. You emotionally prequalified the product before purchase. Now that you own it, it’s up to the brand to keep the promise.
That promise starts when you first hear the word Apple or see the logo and you maybe think: "Gee, the Mac is easy to use. Everyone acknowledges that, even PC owners. I’ve had good experiences with my iPod. And that time I had to return an Apple product, I had a good experience. So I might just give this iPhone a chance. But don’t you let me down." So they—the product and the customer—are already communicating and seem to be getting along. It’s starting to look like it’s up to Apple to deliver on the promise, or else betray the promise. According to Job’s, the dialogue at Apple went something like this: "We all had cell phones. We just hated them; they were so awful to use. The software was terrible. The hardware wasn’t very good. We talked to our friends, and they all hated their cell phones too. This is a great challenge. Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with."
Courtesy of Apple Inc.
The logo and advertising have been part of what led toward a purchase decision, but it’s the design experience of this and past products that makes or breaks the sale.
Apple’s logo, through the years, has evolved from a kind of elaborate little doohickey of Newton sitting under a tree to the iconic rainbow apple with a bite taken out, to a more recent and sweeping metallic version. The evolution reflects that design has been a consistent part of Apple’s interaction with its customer base (and didn’t that rainbow suggest that at least once in his life Steve Jobs might have owned a tie-dyed T-shirt before his move to basic black). But, however stylish the logo has become, it isn’t the brand in the larger sense—it is an iconic symbol of an experiential promise flowing from the design driven nature of Apple.
All you knew from or about Apple in the past amounted to an essentially Gestalt understanding, in that the total was more than the sum of the parts. Apple has leveraged your past experience as to whether you trust its products, or whether they have been designed for the sort of experience you expect will be positive. To this extent, when a new product is announced, it already has a jump ahead of everyone else in the space. Within months of release, the iPhone became the #2 player in the Smartphone space, way ahead of all the established players except the folks behind the BlackBerry. This ability to engender a dialogue and advance understanding comes through time and consistence, all the while being strategic about using design. This Gestalt is a capital asset. That’s what few companies seem able to get; this idea. Why? Because, once again, it isn’t Excel friendly. It is, to some degree, abstract; certainly emotional. It’s about the human experience. It’s about things you have to do that you can’t measure. You have to have faith that this is, in fact, important, and you have to trust your instincts. These are all things that go into the commitment to design a design driven culture.
What often happens is the manager needs to justify a proposal to the vice president, and the vice president needs to justify that to the president, and the president needs to justify that to the board. Unless they’re all comfortable and believe they can monetize a positive customer emotional experience, they struggle. It’s a struggle to go in front of the board and say: "This emotional stuff is really important and we’ve got to spend a hundred million dollars on this." If everyone up and down the line doesn’t fundamentally believe and understand, it’s a challenging thing to get done.
There are scenarios where people have had some success, and they’re smart enough to realize how design was the successful component and they begin to build on it. Then there are a whole lot of people who can’t seem to get their arms around the idea that you need to invest in being design driven beyond a one-time deal. The vast majority of companies that are developing products view the design component as a step in the process. You lay out the product development timeline. You go through the steps to identify an opportunity. You research the opportunity, develop ideas, engineer, manufacture, distribute, and promote. Design kind of happens somewhere in the development of the idea, and design might happen in the promotion space of advertising and packaging and things like that. Design, in these contexts, is a mere event or a series of discrete events in a discrete process, which aren’t integrated into the soul of the company. When you make the shift to an integrated design experience that permeates all aspects of your company’s development, manufacturing, delivery, and follow-up flows, you end up with a far stronger brand.
That’s because brand isn’t about all the external aspects, and it’s not at the whim of what your competitor is up to. It lives as an individual feeling in the gut of your customer, because we all make up our own version of your brand—your brand lives in our bellies. Everyone makes their own decision about what a company’s brand is and what it means and what they feel about it. That’s the way it is because that’s the way we are, that’s the way people operate. What matters is an individual’s gut feeling.
When a bunch of individuals have the same gut feeling, you have a brand. It’s not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is.
Your Brand Is About Value
A good design-savvy company is also cognizant of value. Value doesn’t always equate with a product or service being the least expensive. It’s about the customer getting a satisfying experience for the money, whether from a cup of coffee, an electronic device that is functional and fun, or a service that is always dependable.
One of the challenges is figuring out what people really value and what they are willing to pay for. That’s where Apple pays attention. Typically, they’re slightly above the industry in price. But it’s not an issue because people see the value; they’re getting a higher-quality product; they’re getting a better experience; they’re getting the Apple brand and associations that come with the Apple brand for that extra bit of money spent.
Remember being in the Apple Store back in Chapter 2, "Do You Matter"—when on the way out, you buy a wall charger for your iPod for $29.95, and even if you know you can get a DVD player for less than that at Best Buy, it doesn’t seem to bother you? So you toss it into your basket and you still feel good, even if you paid a little more than the going rate for wall chargers. Or maybe you’ve been on eBay, where you looked at the going rate for a used MacBook Pro versus a Dell or an HP equivalent. You see that a MacBook Pro commands a significant price premium. Then you remember the cool, free, non-Microsoft software that comes with every Mac, so you’re thinking, "Well, the Mac just works, and when it’s all added up, it might actually cost less."
Here is another glimpse of the economic value of designing a brand experience. Although it’s something that’s really tough to define and equate in absolute terms, the described scenarios underscore how a company’s brand is their most valuable asset.
In contrast, consider again a company such as Motorola, traditionally possessed of a strong engineering oriented culture. That in itself isn’t enough to catch the customer experience, especially when they are trying at the same time to be cool. It doesn’t matter if they end up proclaiming after the features, benefits, and techno speak: "And we’re really cool." It doesn’t matter what they say if people don’t feel it. You can’t tell people what to feel with your brand. They’re going to come to their own conclusions in spite of what you pitch or spin. Take a product like the Razr. It ends up being a major blip instead of a trend. Why? Because, even if they have ads that say, "Hello, Moto," it’s still like, "Oh, no, that’s Motorola there, that geeky little symbol. That’s really who they are."
What matters is what people think and feel about your brand. And you don’t control that. While you cannot control what people feel, what you must do is provide influence, and make sure that how you’re doing this authentically represents who you are and what you offer.
How To Really Be Cool, Not Just Act Cool
Imagine taking on one of the biggest market segments in the world, where the output of established competitors is in the billions of units. Your competitors have a firm hold on the major distribution channels, and their advertising budgets are in the mega-millions. Yet you do it without any advertising. Sounds like a gnat on the hip of an elephant, right?
With a motto of "Run with the little guy…create some change," Peter van Stolk of Seattle began what was to become the Jones Soda Company in 1987, though he had never gone to college or studied marketing. The first thing he did was learn the rules of the bottled soda market so he could ignore them.
He competed against companies so big they risked losing touch with the experience of their consumers. Stolk went right to consumers and invited them to put their own pictures on his beverage labels. Initially from a web site that encouraged people to get involved by submitting photos from which a few were selected to be put on the products, Jones Soda evolved to a social network eager to exchange the ever-changing labels in web chat rooms, and then provided an opportunity for those eager to bypass the selection process by getting their own pictures on the labels when they ordered more than 12 bottles.
Of course, the quickest category of consumers to have this approach tickle their fancy was that of those aged 12 to 24, the fastest growing segment, with more than 50 million prospective customers. To that target audience, flavors like Crushed Melon, Fufu Berry, Green Apple, Bug Juice, and Bubble Gum, all in bright neon colors, have a huge and hip appeal. (One Thanksgiving, the company sold 6,000 bottles of turkey and gravy soda.) To appeal to the health food savvy, the company recently moved away from corn syrup to pure cane sugar as their ingredient for sweetness. The main source of buzz is through social media interaction. Quick to tap the sub-culture interest in urban wonders like "what happens when you put Mentos in Diet Coke" (don’t try this at home, by the way), you can go to YouTube and see a video "Jones Soda and the Mentos Experiment." The company’s photos and videos emphasize sports such as skateboarding, extreme sports, the wacky, and the weird.
Without a look back or sideways to his competitors, Stolk is already bringing in $40 million a year in revenue, and he owes it all to consumer involvement. Jones’s customers feel like they’ve joined something. As he puts it, "When you’re marketing without money, you have to stay true to the fact that you need to make an emotional connection." You might say "Well—it’s only $40 million in annual revenues"—but if you owned it, how good would that be?
Your Brand Should Be As Alive As a Person
Another way to look at brand is that it is like an individual’s character. That’s really what a brand is, the embodiment of a company’s character. When you think of the character of people, you find things about them that encourage you to like or dislike them. When you first meet someone, you might draw a few conclusions based on how they dress and style their hair, and few more of their mannerisms. A lot of times you’re right, and a lot of times you’re not. But then, as you gain real insight into their ethics and values and how they treat others, you begin to understand the person’s character. That’s how you really start to define how you feel about somebody. It’s the same way with a company.
You can dress up people in cool clothes, and give them a hip new hairstyle, and create some ideas about, "Wow, maybe they’re really pretty cool and hip," but as you really start to get to know them, you realize that, "No, they’re really moving violations of the truth in packaging laws." All this is a veneer. You start to wonder about them. It’s the same thing with companies. It’s sort of, "Would the real character please stand up?" And character is built more on ethics, on behavior, how people treat others, and how they treat you, and that’s how you build an idea of the character of each of them. It’s the same thing with a brand. That’s exactly what you need to do; communicate at a gut level and have people to get to know your company’s character through all the authentic things they experience. That comes back to the overall experience, and that’s what is so important to a brand.
The big mistake a lot of marketers make is to think, "OK, we need our brand to be cooler. So let’s make our brand cooler, and we’ll tell people we’re cooler, and they’ll have to think we’re cooler." But if it’s not in your character, it’s a mistake. A company really needs to build the qualities of who they are—their purpose, their vision, and their values—they need to be authentic. So, if you are, for example, Motorola, and you need to be more hip and modern, and you need to communicate this to people, then you need to actually become more hip and modern. You can’t just create some ads that do that; you really have to start to look at how are you operating, how are you making decisions, what do you care about, and start to change those things. That takes time, and it’s important.
Being cool is a lot easier if you are, in fact, cool. Take the new audio brand Beats by Dr. Dre. As the recording industry redefines itself to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of digital downloads, companies and artists are looking for new ways to leverage their equity in the marketplace. One way is to market products under a celebrity’s name, and while this is not new in clothing and fragrances, developing "celebrity" consumer electronics is a play not attempted until recently. The rap and hip-hop producer Dr. Dre and Intercope records Chairman Jimmy Iovine have formed an alliance with the design group Ammunition and manufacturer Monster cable to produce audio products, specifically high-quality headphones. The end result is an authentic product and brand that is tuned to the producer’s sound, and designed to relate to his audience. The products are endorsed and worn by actual celebrities. The headphones are objects of lust and sound amazing. The brand does not have to try to be cool. It is cool. And it is authentic.
Brand and experience—it’s like the Queen Mary. The turns are big and take a lot of time and a lot of momentum to happen. As with a person, once you’ve decided somebody’s an ass, it’s going to take you a little while, and some experience, to turn that around, even if you happen to be motivated to do so. Just talking to them once in a while won’t do it. You’re going to have to work with them a while, and be with them, give them a chance, before you decide, "Well, maybe they’re not so bad. Maybe they’re OK." It’s the same thing with a company. Once you’ve decided they don’t deserve the negative values you’ve created about them in your gut, you might become a customer again. But it takes time—they need to prove it to you, and you need to give it a chance. With a company, that often doesn’t happen because the disenchanted customer doesn’t need to make the effort, and usually won’t.
Once There, a Brand’s Success Is Yours to Lose
When you’ve made it, established a brand people like and respect, nothing can touch you. Right? Is that right, Levi-Strauss? Nodding your head, Polaroid? One of the great American Tragedies is the list of companies once successful that are now in their declining days, if not already put to rest in a corporate coffin with a lily on the chest. The fact is, you are not going to make everyone happy, but once you energize your customers against you and start to see web sites like www.ihatestarbucks.com, then you know there is trouble in River City.
One sure sign a company is headed down a slippery slope is when the new CEO doesn’t focus first on customer experience as the basis for the design of everything. When Phil Schoonover took over as CEO of Circuit City Stores, Inc. in 2006, one initial step was to save the company back into profitability. In 2007, he cut 3,000 workers as part of an initiative to save $200 million a year. At the same time, he said, "We want engaged associates who have fun at work, bring a passion about the products, and enjoy serving customers."[17] He wanted, he said, for the company to become an employer of choice. Really? Handing out pink slips sure fires up the joy machine. Right? Well, that does still leave the company with 43,000 employees. But employees are "customers" too. How’s their experience doing?
More to the point, the move signals his first eye isn’t on the company’s design to effectively drive an enhanced customer experience, but rather on employee costs, prices, and other externals.
How has this worked out? Well, the buzzards are watching with eager anticipation.
Another interesting scenario to follow will be what Lenovo does to the IBM ThinkPad, which is a great notebook brand, now that Lenovo has acquired the IBM PC Group. The ThinkPad has been an iconic brand in its market segment, and what happens next will depend on whether Lenovo, which is known for low price-point machines, will really understand what was important about the ThinkPad experience. Within a few years, one possibility is that it’s just going to be another notebook built by an Asian company. If that’s the case, they will have squandered what they paid for the equity of the brand. It’s theirs to keep and prosper from, or to lose.
How Do You Know How You’re Doing in Respect to Customer Experience?
One of the hardest things for you to see is yourself from the perspective of others. The same goes for companies. They might be aware of the need for a shift in awareness, and they might have the determination to do it right, but it’s by no means a given. Younger companies, on the order of Jones Soda, seem to get it quite clearly sometimes. While for more established companies, it can be a real struggle. It’s typical for a lot of large companies to sense they are in trouble, but not know why. For those companies, it’s wise to bring in professional help, to hire a design consultant, or add staff with that skill. They need help understanding how their design experience and brand is degraded, and how they can change that.
One of the biggest challenges that designers face is business credibility. When you slip on your CEO (that would be chief experience officer) cap and look hard at your company, it’s usually difficult to envision making a sweeping, systemic change from one end to the other. The common tendency is to want to put just one toe in the water, to try this one thing. We’ll tell a company they can hire us to design a product, to get to know them, to look at the product line, and we sometimes have to say, "Look, your overall experience is off. You need to do something about that. You need to rethink how you present yourself to people." And they respond with, "Yeah, yeah, but you’re a designer. We hired you to help our engineers develop a product, and we respect you for that, but you’re talking about stuff you don’t know about."
That’s why there is still a credibility gap in business culture, at least in American business culture, of really viewing design as a business partner. When a designer with the experience and talent looks at what you’re doing and says, "You’re missing it, you’re not doing it right, and you’re not communicating appropriately," there’s still an undercurrent of, "Yeah, yeah. I know. But what do you know; you don’t have an MBA." That’s the more hidebound established perspectives of those who are dead right, right up to the point they disappear. Many younger start-up companies these days are more willing to engage. They’re really thinking about: "What are we doing?" One good example of that is Slingbox. They’ve done a lot of things right in defining who they are through their brand, and in their design experience.
It’s a tough concept too, if you think about it. One of the chief foes of a new product and how it can connect to a customer experience is the uphill fight against inertia, against whatever is already established. Slingbox’s entry to market involved that sort of "location shifting," of being able to have a TV at home and then slinging the content up on the internet and being able to view it on a laptop or a mobile phone from virtually anywhere on earth. They’ve done a pretty good job of making people see the value in this along with the experience of the product; it works really well. The little boxes are iconic, and that’s part of it, but the whole set up and operation, and what it is and how it works and what it’s delivering, is really well thought-out and well defined. It’s a lot easier when you’re a start-up and you’re starting fresh to do that. Like we said, it’s much harder to go back and change things that are already in place, especially if they’ve been in place for years and years and years.
© Sling Media, Inc.
For a CEO of an established company, once things start to go wrong, and it’s painfully, publicly obvious that it’s gone wrong, the road back is very difficult. Just like the human body, or the family auto, your company needs an annual checkup. What companies should do is not just fret about their specific needs to develop a product, but audit what they’re doing overall and how they’re presenting themselves to the public. The time-established ways of marking and measuring how they are doing aren’t going to cut it when it comes to customer experience. Just because you’ve gotten customer surveys and employee surveys, you still haven’t gotten to the gut level. Our experience is that most executives are not very good at relating what they find in those surveys to the totality of their culture, and what those surveys are the early warning signals for. They’re not able to contextualize the information in ways that make it actionable.
Sometimes—especially in surveys out to the general public—you have to view the feedback contextually. The person that’s giving the information might have special circumstances. You can see obvious trends but few people are equipped to figure out what gut feelings you’re creating in people. You probably need to hire people who understand design to look at why and how your customers are getting the feelings they do. What is it that you’re doing throughout your customer experience supply chain that’s creating the bad brand experience for people? You also need to be really clear about what you’re doing really well so you can do more of it.
The idea of having an annual audit is a good thing. Saying every year you will look at how you’re performing, and maybe where to start is to define the things to measure. But what are the things you should be auditing?
In the world of operations, a lot of companies have tons of ways of measuring the things they know and can quantify. Dell is extraordinarily adept at measuring stuff. What most companies don’t know, though, is how to measure, really get a hands-on grasp for, customer experience. They might admit, "OK, I understand it matters; now, how do I actually measure it?" How do I get insight into it, what are the right metrics?" The fact is, there aren’t clear metrics, and if you try to do it too often, you actually hurt the situation. Some of it is a leap of faith, and there you either need to develop the razor-edge instincts of a consumer—and we think Apple has done that—or you need to hire talent, inside or outside, to help you develop a culture that is able to do all this. You need to believe that design matters, you need to believe that experience is important, and then you need to look at the things that create great experience. We are talking about emotional reality here, and you can’t put emotions on a spreadsheet.
In the next chapter, to support what you’ve considered here, you explore how products can become portals to experience that matter to customers, along with how you design for experience chain management.