Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

by Bernadette Jiwa

There are only two things we want—we want to hide and we want to be seen.

with a lot of dreams left inside him because he didn’t understand that there was no reason to wait for tomorrow to be better—that he didn’t need to hide.

If you die tomorrow, what's the dream that doesn't have tgo wait that would die with you?

Early on in the process, we are so focused on ideation and creation that we forget to think about the story we will ask the customer to believe when the product launches, and so we miss an opportunity to make the product or service better.

There is a life and a way of being before the product or service existed, and a life and a way of being after it.

There is a before-the-product story and an after-the-product story.

‘Who do you want your customer to become?’ Before [your product], people did. After [your product], people do.

There’s something magical about the experience of taking a blank sheet of paper and being able to make it take flight with just a few careful, strategic folds.

there might have been no Wright brothers’ first flight—but also to teach children about engineering, physics, possibility and small miracles. With one or two simple folds, a child learns that her actions can affect her results and that the way she builds something matters.

Your business is that blank sheet. The kind of plane you build depends on how and where you make the folds.

Success is not what you make, but the difference that it makes in people’s lives.

Technology is not just taking us forward—it’s taking us back. It’s giving us back the ability to better understand our customers so that we can be not only useful, but also important to the people we serve.

What we want more than responsive organisations is personal relevance.

The best inventions are never finished.

It’s part love, part necessity. Because if they don’t reinvent their ideas time and again, someone else will—rendering their life’s work irrelevant, or worse still, extinct! —ERIC SCHMIDT, GOOGLE

The feeling of being understood by a brand used to surprise and delight us, but we have come to expect it now.

Proximity has taken on a whole new meaning. The places where we feel like we belong may no longer be our neighbourhoods. Where we choose to hang out isn’t dictated by our physically being there.

Innovation is a by-product of empathy.

Imagine a world where businesses thought hard about the story their customers would tell about their product before they began to create it.

The stories our customers believe in shape our ideas, and our ideas shape our customers.

We’re coming to realise that understanding our customer and his worldview is no longer the long way round.

The best way to get attention, then, is to give it unconditionally first.

To start whispering ‘I see you’ instead of screeching ‘LOOK AT ME’.

Brands that were once unassailable are losing out to smaller, agile companies that have become more relevant because they have the ability to be responsive to customers’ needs.

Incumbents have been slow to adapt and they continue to try to make people want things, while upstart brands have recognised the power of making things people want.

The ‘little guy’ doesn’t have to start with his company’s own story or the current reality of a corporate behemoth. He can start where the customer is, see where she wants to go and build something for a reality that doesn’t yet exist. No maintenance of the status quo required.

Without meaning, products and services are just commodities and nobody wants to be in the commodities business.

We resist trying to deviate too far from the expected norms because the price of failure feels too high. We choose safety over the extraordinary. We do the done thing because that’s what has the least chance of being an outright failure.

The irony is that the unremarkable and familiar thing also has the least chance of being a runaway success.

As businesspeople, innovators, artists and creators, we have two choices. We can simply keep giving customers what works today, or we can make it our business to understand where those people we serve want to go and take them there.

Where does your tribe want to go? How Can your product/service help them get there?

we need to put down the pencil and start with the people. The people are the architecture—they are the foundation and framework for everything we build. The people will shape the character of the building.

Success doesn’t come from simply making things that work—it is born from changing the story of the user or customer for the better.

In 2010, Eric Schmidt pointed out that we now create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.

Enter Airbnb, the company that unlocked the latent value in unused spaces by building a platform that didn’t just sell a room for the night, but facilitated a connection between two people who had no way of knowing that they could trust each other.

Clearly, watching what people do is not the same as paying attention to how they feel.

in fact, twenty-three light bulbs were developed before Edison’s. But Edison was the inventor who went on to make electric light bulbs a commercial success, patenting the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb in 1880.

The value wasn’t merely in the discovery; it was in making that discovery accessible so that it created a difference.

How can you make your product/service accessible that it can create a diffrence?

We have come to care about all parts of the buying journey as much as we care about ownership.

We have less chance of engaging with our audience if we don’t fully understand the context in which they will use our product, no matter how good that product is.

It’s been proven that people are more likely to buy things based on the recommendation of a friend. In fact, 71 percent of us are more likely to make purchases based on social media referrals.

Understand how customers see the world. They don’t know the solutions, but they know the problems well. If you haven’t talked to a customer today, you’re doing it wrong.

If it isn’t going to benefit 80 percent of their customers 80 percent of the time, then it probably isn’t going to get built.

We simplify, we perfect, we start over, until everything we touch enhances each life it touches. —APPLE ‘INTENTION’ VIDEO

New rules of brand awareness: Understand the customers' story. Make something they want. Give them a story to tell. Create brand affinity.

What's The story you give your customers?

Awareness of our products and services is not what spreads our stories. Our stories spread when we are aware of our customers.

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.

The customer is their compass.

Today we take windscreen wipers for granted, and perhaps, like me, you imagined that they were invented along with the car. Not so.

Mary worked with a designer to create the first manually operated windscreen wiper, which she obtained the patent for in 1903 (it expired in 1920). It would take almost two more decades for wipers to become standard on new automobiles.

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.

Once our basic needs are taken care of, the thing that we want most as humans is to matter.