Book of the Month: “Do You Matter?”
Starting this month, I’d like to begin sharing the titles of books that I’m currently reading. These could be for business or personal, or sometimes both. It’s suiting that the first book featured in my book share was suggested to me by Reid Harman, the president of Echelon Design. This month’s title is “Do You Matter? How great design will make people love your company” by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery.
I’m only half-way through this one so far, but already I’ve come across several key points that I deemed worth sharing before I reach the back cover. The book is centered on the question, “if your company were gone tomorrow, would anyone care?”
Brunner, founder of Ammunition LLC and former Director of Industrial Design at Apple, says the answer to that question is predicated by whether or not your company, at its core, is motivated by design in every aspect of its operations. He defines design as “the thoughtful development of information points between you and your customers.”
It encompasses the physical nature of your brand (sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound) and evokes some emotional response or connection to the point that customers experience it.
This is so important Brunner says because “any emotional pebble in the customer’s road can become magnified into a perceptual paradigm shift resulting in negative feelings about your company.”
Naturally, being the former Apple man that he is, Brunner references his former companies success in attention to design along every step of the design of its products. Notably, the iPod, which Brunner declares as the most prolific consumer product of this generation, wouldn’t be the iPod without its slick casing, intuitive user interface, or even the retail experience you get when stepping foot into an Apple store.
This book begs the question, what can you be doing to infuse intelligent design into your brand, products and services?
I’ll be interested to reading your thoughts. Post them in our Tradeshow Expert form here, and then I will respond to your feedback in one my next posts. Feel free to share any books that you’re reading right now. I’m on the lookout for another good one to share.
Until then…
About Stewart Emery:
Stewart Emery has coached more than 12,000 people over the past 30 years. As leader of Belvedere Consultants, he has served clients ranging from Cadence Design Systems to KQED, and asked the questions that led MasterCard to its “Priceless” campaign. He is coauthor of Success Built to Last.
