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Tesco lost their market dominance by failing to stay relevant to people.
MAKE THINGS PEOPLE WANT
Today, meaning and value are created at the intersection of the customer’s worldview and your understanding of how your product aligns with that worldview.
Well, if I told you that it took IKEA six years from the idea to the opening of the company’s first store in South Korea, that would offer up some clues. Six years of research in order to understand the country’s unique culture and the worldviews of the prospective customers they were building the store for so that they could tell a story that resonated.
‘At home’ isn’t just a place. It’s a feeling. Like being in the most comfortable space in the universe. So for us, understanding people’s life at home is the most natural place to start. Every year, we visit homes all around the world to find out what people dream about.
The Knapper, for example—a standing mirror that lets you hang clothes behind it—was designed to help people start their days more calmly by giving them a place to set out their clothes the night before.
“do-it-yourself” furniture concepts were practically unheard of prior to IKEA,
We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
THE CONTEXT REVOLUTION
if we want to get inside people’s wallets, we first need to get inside their heads and, more important, their hearts.
A brand’s reputation is everything and trust creates value.
It’s about investing time, energy and resources to understand their lives, their challenges, hopes, dreams and fears, to figure out how whatever you’re creating has a chance of addressing some of those.
New rules of brand awareness: Understand the customers' story. Make something they want. Give them a story to tell. Create brand affinity.
The bottom line is that people don’t just buy the thing, they buy the feeling, so knowing what feelings your products and services are designed to elicit is just as important as knowing what features to leave out or put in.
Code is easy, people are hard. It often takes the best engineers the longest to realize this.
The team at Patagonia believe that ‘one of the most responsible things we can do as a company is to make high-quality stuff that lasts for years and can be repaired, so you don’t have to buy more of it.’ They innovate for and market to those customers who believe what they believe. The customer is their compass.
What you do need is to recognise the importance of doing that as the first step to creating products and services that matter to the people who use them.
The job of every single business on the planet is to do just one thing—to make people happy. When you find ways to do that, you win.
Making sense of the information our customers give us, both consciously and unconsciously—and then doing something that creates value with what we make of that data—is where the opportunity to create meaning lies.
FRICTIONLESS
CHARACTERISTICS OF DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS
Disruptive innovations: Start with a purpose and a small problem, rather than a big idea. Are based on what people do, not what they say they do. Leverage data to get closer to users, customers or fans. Can be more responsive to customers’ behaviours and needs. Tap into consumers’ latent desires.
Making things is an art. Making things meaningful is an art and a science. When we understand what doesn’t work, we can fix it. When we know what people want, we can give it to them. When we realise what people care about, we can create more meaningful experiences. When we make things people love, we don’t have to make people love our things. When our values align with the worldviews of our customers, we succeed. When business exists to create meaning, not just money, we all win.
WHO IS YOUR MUSE?
We hold monthly town hall meetings to listen to their concerns, to find out what is on their minds.
Liste yo understand customer
Like Tor, Linda and Adi, every great innovator or change maker has a muse who is the catalyst that ignites their vision of what could be—someone whose life will be different and better when she lives in a world with their product or service in it.
We have to really see the world through their eyes and observe them experiencing it in real time (not just in a focus group complete with loaded questions) in order to understand how anything we create can make a difference.
When you genuinely care about and empathise with the people you make things for, those things can’t help but become meaningful.
It turns out that the best way to create a solution is to name someone’s problem or aspiration. Meaningful solutions are those that are created for actual people with problems, limitations, frustrations, wants, needs, hopes, dreams and desires that we then have a chance of fulfilling.
WORLDVIEWS
A worldview is a point of view, a way of seeing the world. Worldviews are not formed objectively and supported by facts. They are subjective, values-based reflections of our experiences and beliefs.
Our worldviews shape our attitudes and biases, influence our decisions ...
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One of my astute readers, Tim Graham of Integrity Fitness, captures the importance of understanding worldviews like this: I have older people coming to fitness classes with young people’s music, loud stuff like dubstep. Most fitness offerings would place them in a category of ‘older adults’ and give them something they assume they want or need. But maybe they’d like to feel young again? Exercise does that, but maybe a ‘young’ environment works better for them. Maybe they don’t want ‘old folks’ exercise?
Think of your product or service as the catalyst or enabler of something in the life of customers and users. Describe their lives before your product (café, software, app, yoga pants) became part of their stories and then their lives after it.
When you understand how the customer’s story will unfold in the presence of your product and how that product helps to shape his new reality, then you can work backwards to the feelings that the features and functionality must create in order to move your customer from here to there.
Disruptive innovators thrive on creating difference first and focus on growth later.
they almost never begin by designing a product—they always start by understanding the problem to be solved, and that problem always belongs to someone specific, who has a particular worldview.
THE INNOVATION TRIFECTA
START WITH THEIR STORY
The blueprint started with their story, and it starts with yours, too—with your desire to create ideas that fly.
THE LEVEL OF LOVE
When a company cares about its staff, suppliers, customers and the way it shows up in and affects the world, that caring is reflected in the pr...
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THE STORY STRATEGY BLUEPRINT
LOVE PEOPLE + MAKE SOMETHING THEY LOVE
customer-worthiness. This is the most important lens we can apply, the most accurate measurement of meaningful work.
When everything you do is framed by the question ‘Is this product or service worthy of my customer and why?’ it changes everything.
