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Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company

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Authors: Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery, Russ Hall
Publisher: FT Press
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$24.99~~
Buy New: $15.16
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

71 reviews
Sales Rank: 15846

Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.7 x 1

ISBN: 0137142447
Dewey Decimal Number: 745.2
EAN: 9780137142446
ASIN: 0137142447

Publication Date: August 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.

Also Available In:

•	Kindle Edition - Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
More and more companies are coming to understand the competitive advantage offered by outstanding design. With this, you can create products, services, and experiences that truly matter to your customers' lives and thereby drive powerful, sustainable improvements in business performance. But delivering great designs is not easy. Many companies accomplish it once, or twice; few do it consistently. The secret: building a truly design-driven business, in which design is central to everything you do. Do You Matter? shows how to do precisely that. Legendary industrial designer Robert Brunner (who laid the groundwork for Apple's brilliant design language) and Stewart Emery (Success Built to Last) begin by making an incontrovertible case for the power of design in making emotional connections, deepening relationships, and strengthening brands. You'll learn what it really means to be "design-driven" and how that translates into action at Nike, Apple, BMW and IKEA.You'll learn design-driven techniques for managing your entire experience chain; define effective design strategies and languages; and learn how to manage design from the top, encouraging "risky" design innovations that lead to entirely new markets. The authors show how (and how not) to use research; how to extend design values into marketing, manufacturing, and beyond; and how to keep building on your progress, truly "baking" design into all your processes and culture.

Customer Reviews: Read 66 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

This Book Doesn't Matter November 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

This book is a bit of a caricature of itself. While gushing way too long about the iPod and other Apple products (one of the authors is a former Mac executive) the main point of the book is that a brand or a product should be built around the customer experience and that all interactions with that brand should be consistent with the desired outcome of that experience.

Fair enough, but hardly revolutionary. The authors contrast Apple with Dell and play up the fact that Apple got the experience right while Dell did not, leading to Dell's downfall. Really? I'm pretty sure that Dell built its entire operation around the customer experience aspect of efficiency in distribution and pricing. There was even that period of time where "Dude, you're getting a Dell," made it hip to have a Dell, but Dell's price advantages (like Gateway's) were lost as users moved from desktops to laptops.

The authors say as much but somehow leap from that example to have us consider that the efficiencies around iTunes and the iPod are much different without making a compelling argument that it will be.

One of the main arguments is that the customer experience design was built-in for the iPod, but this whole argument seems a stretch because the authors hardly seem like design experts. Even the odd-shaped book breaks down the experience argument, where the authors seemed more intent on making a statement with the book size than considering the experience of reading through the narrow pages.

They close with 3 cliche thoughts: 1. Design matters (hard to think they don't believe that since they wrote the book); 2. Design is a process, not an event (any benefit of the doubt they deserved, I think, is lost with this anti-leading edge statement); 3. If it was easy, everybody would do it (well, duh, if it was easy they wouldn't feel compelled to write a book about it).

The authors know a good product that's working today, but they don't demonstrate any insight into whether or not it will work tomorrow beyond their own preference of what seems to work for them. If you are a seasoned marketing executive, you've already read this book. A search on Amazon for "customer experience" will show a fairly long list of books already out about this topic, or reading some old Tom Peters books or even Competing for the Future would be better places to go.

1 out of 5 stars

pompous blabbler November 27, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

There is something ironic about the argument of this book, which suggests that companies can turn their customers into idolatrous devotees. Two things wrong here: the authors never explain how this is done, and the entire premise that any product under the right stewardship can be the next iPod -- cultish bought for too much money -- is completely suspect given the economic downturn we face. Save your money -- you can read this sort of drivel on Business Week's website.

4 out of 5 stars

An enjoyable (and educational) read November 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I grabbed this book because the title seemed interesting and, hey, the cover is bright orange!

My background is mostly technical; the business side of business has never interested me at all. Never in a million years would I see myself picking up a 'business self-help' or industrial design book, but I figured I would step outside my comfort zone and give it a try.

I am glad that I did. The concepts presented here transcend business alone and the book provides advice and examples of real companies that have succeeded and those that have lost their way. If you're a fan of companies like Apple, Harley-Davidson, BMW, IKEA, or ever wondered what happened to Sharper Image and Polariod, this book should interest you.

I found the book entertaining and readable. However, I did start to lose interest near the last chapter. To me, that means that the book was just long enough for me. Hey, this was a big step for me -- I did finish the book and felt that I came away with a new perspective and respect for companies that invest in design.

The book is well organized and walks through areas like why good design matters, why you should care and provides guidance regarding how to understand your customers and their needs.

I appreciate the sidebar text that effectively summarizes key points on the page in a sentence or two for easy reference or skimming. Nuggets like, "When a company establishes this enduring commitment to a design-driven culture, then the customer, in turn, often grants the company the option to fail once in a while."

The bottom line for me is that any products can be duplicated and reverse-engineered, and anyone can make a great product. The trick is obtaining an emotional connection with your customer so that they will return for more. That requires constant work and company-wide dedication to customer experience engineering and design. Take risks -- and watch what works and what does not. Use that information to make your products and services better.

This book does not set out to give step-by-step instructions for making your business design-oriented -- there is no one method that works for everyone -- but it provides a lot of advice, and F.L.A.V.O.R.

If it was easy, everybody would do it.

3 out of 5 stars

Design Matters...But, Do You? November 24, 2008
"Do You Matter" is a is an important entry in the growing list of titles that address the business of building a brand. In a lot of ways, it is connected to recent titles like "Made to Stick," and "Buying In," in that it focuses on the secondary (and often subliminal) elements of achieving excellence and outselling the competition.

Like those titles, the book focuses on cutting through a cluttered market and making a connection with your customer -- here, the magic connector is design.

100 years ago, in order to buy a pair of shoes, a person found the local shoemaker, told the artisan what he wanted and agreed on a price. The question of whether that shoemaker would get their return business depended on a lot of factors that played out over the relationship: how close did the shoemkaer come to producing what the customer wanted? did the product hold up? how did the product perform for the intended purpose? In other words, there was a personal relationship between the customer and the producer, with the product as fulcrum. Machined, mass-manufacture changed that equation, and the new efficiencies that resulted added a new dimension to the consumer exchange: the customer might sacrifice some control but he would get a better price. Outsourcing and overseas production changed that equation further, nw even the producer lost some control, but price was paramount.

That era has played itself out and all of the efficiencies available have been maximized across nearly all competitors. The result: today, shoes are available from dozens of different and competing companies at about the same level of quality and at the same price with the same convenience of acquisition.

"Do You Matter" attempts to answer the question: how do you seperate your product? Their answer, if Customer A has the choice of five identically priced and similarly useful shoes to choose from, design superiority is where you can grab market share.

The book's premise is particularly resonant given the economic times. There is some question out there as to whether -- in a cost-cutting time -- companies will still make the investments that they have recently expanded in things like sustainability practice, or design. The answer is that succesful businesses will figure out that they must. In a consumer culture where buyers are faced with a bevy of sellers peddling wares of largely similar quality, utility and price, it will be the identification issues that win the day: brand, sustainable id, design preeminence.

The book is set-up very much as a "how-to," and there is where I find one of its weaknesses (or at least a narrowing effect). Who is the reader? Many of the examples they employ in their anecdotes and lessons come from very well-known Fortune 500 companies, or much-heralded maverick small businesses and entrepeneurs. In theory, one could conceive of people in all of these spheres having some utility for the book. But, given that it is very much a "call to action" type of a book, for it to have the desired effect, the reader would have to be a Marketing VP, or someone similarly well-situated to employ the tactics discussed. At the same time, unless they were also the person who was doing the design, the book doesn't give an overall "marching order" that could easily form a philosophy for organization-wide adherence.

For those reasons, I don't see the book serving much purpose beyond the small entrepeneur or Inc. Magazine kind of company where the leadership, management, and ownershiop are tightly enough connected to the sales and marketing (not to mention the other groups employed in industrial design elements) functions to effectuate the change.

This is a worthy title, wrapped up in a snappy orange and black hardcover package (no dust jacket), but offers limited utility.

4 out of 5 stars

Services marketing updated for the 21st century November 23, 2008
Do You Matter was fun to read, with lots of good examples and takeaways on just about every other page. I especially liked the way the authors challenge us to ask, "If your company went away, would anyone miss you?"

The authors use "design" in a broad sense to mean the creation of the customer experience. Their horrendous airport experience at Dulles is viewed as bad design. As the authors point out, a for-profit company could not treat its employees that way. And they refer to the supply chain of experience, a potentially powerful concept.

But in the end, these ideas are not new. Back when I began my PhD in 1982, I was interested in services marketing. We presented the same concepts: creating an emotional experience, seeing the service from the customer's perspective, and innovating to give customers more positive experience.

The examples are different, with the exception of Southwest Airlines. And last time I flew Southwest, in 2006, I found the airline has modified some practices that made it such a great example of service deign. Southwest used to give out seating group assignments based on arrival time at the airport. That way passengers were motivated to be there, ready to board and check in on time. But now I had to check in by computer 24 hours early ...a whole different process. So maybe it's time to update that example too.

Bottom line: An enjoyable read. But you'll find similar points in services marketing textbooks and articles from the 1990s. Do You Matter just presents them in a 21st century package.

Ironically, the book itself could benefit from better design. It's tightly bound and the pages don't lie flat unless you bend the spine. The cover is a graphic design that will stand out on any bookstore or library shelf. The title presents two ideas, not necessarily connected. A product or service might matter a great deal, without being loved. And many of us love products and services that don't, or shouldn't, make a lot of difference in our lives.

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