Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

by Bernadette Jiwa

The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.

If marketing is about making people aware of the value you create, to do that, you have to unlock the value in your story. If innovation is about creating value, to do that well, you must unlock the value in the stories of the people you hope to serve.

What companies and entrepreneurs sometimes forget is that the purpose of innovation is not simply to make new, improved products and services; it is to make things that are meaningful to the people who use them. The challenge for every company, entrepreneur, business owner and innovator is understanding which ideas will fly and why. The solution lies in following a principle that management consultant Peter Drucker spoke about decades ago: ‘the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer’. Drucker goes as far as to say that the customer is the ‘starting point’ of a business’s purpose.

Every successful business creates a new kind of customer. That customer’s story changes because the business exists. There is a before-the-product story and an after-the-product story. The change that’s brought about doesn’t have to be as monumental as the changes that companies like Google create; they can be small shifts in attitude and perception, nearly imperceptible changes in habits that become rituals over time. Enhancing your products or services might signal advancement and feel like progress, but if there is no change in the customer, there is no innovation. What happens because your product exists? Or as author Michael Schrage would say, ‘Who do you want your customer to become?’

As customers, what we crave more than the commodity we think we are paying for is to be understood. What we want more than a reliable ride to our destination, a comfortable bed for the night, or even a book we can get our teeth into, is to really be seen. What we want more than responsive organisations is personal relevance. The value isn’t just in the data that businesses collect. What counts is how they use it to make our lives better.

Remember, though, that having an innovation department doesn’t necessarily mean you’re innovating, for at its core, innovating is about creating something that makes a difference in the lives of users. It has to start with understanding the expectations of the people who will use the product. And what people value most isn’t what some companies are focused on delivering.

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

What I love about Dylan’s story and the Shopify customer development story is that Shopify doesn’t create anything (however elegant a solution it seems) without understanding how it’s going to help a person to run her business in the real world. 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. That’s no mean feat when your customers are as big as Google and as tiny as a stay-at-home mum operating a kitchen-table business, but knowing where their customers started and where they hope to go makes all the difference.

Old rules of brand awareness: Make something for everyone. Tell our story. Attract customers. Build brand awareness. The brands that succeed today have flipped things around. New rules of brand awareness: Understand the customers' story. Make something they want. Give them a story to tell. Create brand affinity.

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

And yet, the opportunity to create value from the soft data we collect every day, in the form of feedback, stories and gestures from loyal customers, remains largely untapped in a world that’s focused on taking advantage of hard data.

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. These solutions are born from investing time in hearing what people say, watching what they do (or don’t do, but want to) and caring about them enough to want to solve that problem or create that solution that takes them to where they want to go.

Evidenced by the success of brands like Chipotle, Warby Parker, The Honest Company, Harry’s, Death to the Stock Photo, Holstee, Johanna Basford, CreativeMornings, Flow Hive, Airbnb, Padre Coffee, Bahen & Co. and The Distillery (and I could keep going), I’m here to tell you once and for all that giving a damn is seriously underrated and caring is a competitive advantage. I believe that love can become a more significant differentiator only in a world where people increasingly care about purpose, individuality, sustainability, provenance and ethics. How we make is equally important as what we make. While there may not yet be room for the ‘L’ word in every boardroom, my hope is that you’ll see the sense of making room for it in your business.

MAKE SOMETHING + MAKE PEOPLE LOVE IT OR LOVE PEOPLE + MAKE SOMETHING THEY LOVE

In our own quest for significance and success, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what our customers, audiences and communities want (and will pay for) are complex solutions to their big problems. What they really want, in fact, is to be helped to do the things they want to do. They may just want thoughtful solutions to ordinary problems. The smallest thing can feel like magic to someone who has been living with a problem they may not be able to articulate.

The trap we fall into is trying to tell people how life-changing our widget is. If it changes their lives, we won’t have to tell them.