How To Create Brand Devotees.

Design for Experience. It’s Not Enough To Do The Job Better.

Historically, product innovation has centered around making advances in the quality of specific features — longer battery life, faster delivery, better flavor, sleeker design. The problem is that the speed of innovation has become so rapid and information is so accessible, that these advances are no longer enough. A company like Samsung makes a curved screen and their competitors come out with a similar item six months later. Delta changes route planning to increase on-time performance but they don’t see their market share shift. Why?

Products that ‘do the job better’ aren’t having the same impact anymore. That is because the ‘jobs’ have changed. Customers in today’s marketplace have come to expect more than better products. With saturation in nearly every product category, experience is the new product differentiator. By adding experience innovation into the mix, companies can catapult their efforts into something lasting and meaningful — capturing market share by deepening the value they provide to their customers.

With saturation in nearly every product category, experience is the new product differentiator.

User experience innovation adds length to your stride.

Using experience innovation to bolster your traditional R&D innovation efforts can lead to providing more holistic value and lasting customer loyalty. The key is understanding meaningful, applicable, relevant experiences that your customers want. How can your product make a real difference in their lives?

Nike has seen explosive growth over the last decade. They were named the most innovative company on the planet by Fast Company in 2013. They didn’t achieve this solely by creating new shoe lines or better advertising campaigns with sexier sports celebrities. Instead, they broadened their look beyond the immediate product and looked into their customer’s lives. What were their aspirations? Their goals? What got them going in the morning? What barriers stood in their way? From this, Nike+ was launched in 2006. It quickly became one of the most powerful social platforms for fitness enthusiasts — expanding from hard core runners to people with everyday aspirations. More importantly, it provided a platform from which multiple other innovative Nike products — FuelBand, sensors in shoes and clothing — could succeed over the long term in spite of competitor’s efforts to catch them in a feature-by-feature war.

Creating loyal customers starts with empathy.

Another way experience innovation can transform R&D at your company is by expanding your view into new areas of innovation. It can help you discover untapped adjacent market opportunities in places you hadn’t thought to look before. Similar to what Nike did with social media on Nike+ or Tesla’s transformation of car dealerships, understanding the holistic experience customers have with your product will lead to unexpected insights. Sometimes simply asking ‘what happens right before someone uses our product? what about right after?’ can unlock an entire innovation area previously untouched by you or your competitors. It allows you to begin to understand your customers in ways that are transformative. And it can transform your customer’s opinion of you. What works for inter-personal relationships also applies to relationships between companies and their customers. It makes people feel good to be seen, to be understood. And it is the first step in forming lasting, loyal bonds. It is no accident that Harley Davidson’s customers happily tattoo the logo onto their bodies or that Apple fans still line up for the iPhone even though it is now several generations old. Making your customers feel seen and valued pays long dividends.

It makes people feel good to be seen, to be understood. And it is the first step in forming lasting, loyal bonds.

Your innovation mantra: value, relevance, context

To jumpstart experience innovation at your company, you need to turn your eye toward value, relevance and context. When the efforts of experience innovation are combined with or integrated into traditional efforts at a company, that is when the magic happens. This is not an either/or proposition. Rather, experience innovation is designed to lead or funnel product innovation efforts into directions that are more meaningful to a company’s customers. It can work in several different ways. First, it can directly enhance your traditional innovation efforts by bringing context and relevance to them — to help make decisions on how advancements will be implemented or to short-list priorities in strategic planning. What value does said innovation bring to your customers? How does it address current pain points? What problem does it solve? Answering these questions allows a company to answer the all-important question: ‘So, what?” We’ve made an advancement, but what does that really mean? How can we ensure it delivers on its promise?