9

D4Me: Designing for Meaningful Experiences

This guest chapter by Ted Matthews explains how meaningful experiences are made and why they are especially memorable and powerful. It describes how we, as a society, have developed behavioral and experiential patterns such as rituals and myths. It will also introduce his method, D4Me, which explains how these mechanisms can be systematically used in your design as a way of creating memorable and heightened customer experiences.

Meaningful and Memorable Moments

Recently I heard an interview with a young fan talking about Burnley Football Club’s return to European football (“soccer,” if you prefer) after an absence of 51 years. In his excitement he explained that his dad had actually been at “The Orient Game.” Burnley was therefore in their blood, and neither could believe that the team was now back playing top-flight football. I too was at “The Orient Game” (see Figure 9-1). I felt a curious sense of pride and belonging that I could say I was there. The experience of that game was one of those meaningful and, indeed, memorable experiences in my life.

It was May 9, 1987. I was 16 years old. My friend Tony had nipped out during school lunch break to get us tickets. My parents didn’t like me going to football games. However, this game was important; if we didn’t win, we would be thrown out of the football league forever!

So damn it, I had to go, despite parental protestations and the £1.10 entrance fee. The stadium was absolutely packed. Tony and I wore claret and blue scarves and sang along to songs that had been sung there for a century. We were just 16 but felt like grown-ups now. We swore and shouted like wild things, moving helplessly with the crowd, which swayed and swelled like a rough sea on the packed terraces. We had Haffner’s meat and potato pies at half time.

I have no recollection of the game itself other than us winning. But I remember with exceptional clarity all the other elements of the day. After the match we stormed the pitch to join the happy throng of supporters. Grown men cried, strangers hugged each other, and a run-down Lancastrian town came together in hope and relief.

In the 30 years since this game, the term “The Orient Game” has become a meaningful symbol of struggle, woven into the narrative of the club and the town. It is meaningful for me and to fellow fans when I say I was there. It was meaningful then and has become understood as more meaningful with time.

But Why Was It Meaningful?

This experience was meaningful because of the larger cultural backdrop, the culture to which Tony and I belonged: that of a working-class northern English mill town. This game, like most football games, was a form of ritual where we could express this belonging—a ritual that included symbols such as club scarves, songs, and even food (it would have included beer, but we were too young to get served). The larger context of the game itself, relating to the town and club’s history and the increased drama of relegation, also heightened our stake in the experience. Clearly the other important factor was the assembly of thousands of other fans. It was tribal, and the sheer volume of humanity focused on a single outcome supercharged the experience and amplified the meaning.

These kinds of experiences are remembered better and longer than the mundane. They leave an indelible mark in the brain. Such events imprint what is referred to as “flashbulb memories” and a key part of this is about the shared experience, about being part of something greater, and how significant these events are to our lives. Rituals, myths, and collective symbols are ways to bring meaning to the experience. These societal mechanisms act as passageways to meaning, creating, in turn, meaningful and memorable experiences.

In trying to understand why people, specifically millennials, are less and less inclined to attend church, Thurston and ter-Kuile of Harvard Divinity School explain in their report How We Gather that while people are still looking for meaning, they are doing so outside of religion.1 They argue that people are seeking community, personal transformation, social transformation, purpose, creativity, and accountability. One of the strongest urges, they argue, is that of community and the shared meaningful experience. Future trend innovation company TrendWatching suggests that “consuming means participating in networks that are both personally and socially valuable,” freeing consumers to “dive in and embrace more meaningful and positive consumerism.”2

The experience-centric organization can use these societal mechanisms as material to design deep connections with customers and memorable experiences that transcend the everyday. In the next section I describe these mechanisms and then go on to show how you can use them to deliver really great experiences.

Consuming Meaning

Smart organizations such as Harley Davidson and Apple have used these mechanisms for many years and have built a strong, loyal following. Just like football fans, they assemble for events where they engage in ritualized behavior, expressing their belonging through actions and symbols like logos, products, and the language they use. In assembly they further supercharge their experiences.

Despite some cooling in the ardor of Apple devotees since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011, the brand is still a good example of how some companies seem to generate meaningful experiences for their customers. “Macheads,” as they have been called, attend Apple Store openings with the same verve and excitement Tony and I had at “The Orient Game.” They hold unboxing parties and invite friends, engaging in ritualized activity. They wear symbols of the brand on their clothes, with subtle hierarchies of meaning, from the “vintage” striped logos to the modern versions. Macheads feel like they belong to a community and want to express that belonging. Through their consumption they have meaningful experiences. If you don’t believe me, do a Google image search for “Apple tattoo;” you’ll find hundreds of images. Do the same search for “Microsoft tattoo” and there are just a handful.

It’s difficult to know how active Apple has been in encouraging customer rituals and related meaningful activity. What is clear, however, is that they are very good at their own myth and symbol making around their products, the origins of the company, and, not least, their shaman, Steve Jobs. Launches of new products are surrounded with the secrecy of papal appointments, and the events themselves are ritualized proceedings with sermons from their heads of tech, design, and finally from the current master of ceremonies, Tim Cook. Despite the fact that Apple is the world’s biggest brand, many of those who consume it buy into a mythology of the creative, renegade outsider, and this is what they celebrate when they engage in its rituals, symbols, stories, and, of course, its products.

Meaningful Is the New Black

We are now in a meaning-based economy where consumers are actively seeking products or services that not only match their likes and interests but also deliver something authentic and meaningful in their lives. Consumers want to be transformed through their consumption. Consumers want to hit that self-actualizing top tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs through what they consume. Simona Rocchi, Senior Director of Innovation and Design-for-Sustainability Studies at Philips, suggests that to be successful in today’s market, businesses have to “enhance meaning” in their customer experiences. The meaning economy is on us now! (See Figure 9-2.)

All experiences have meaning, but some are more meaningful to customers than others. Meaning is how we read the world around us, and something that is meaningful to us matters to us and gets noticed. The experience-centric organization knows which meanings need to be taken into account as part of its offering, and can design this into everything it does.

The experience-centric organization is able to understand the broader cultural context and dig into those things that are meaningful to customers. Exact meaning might differ from one person to the next; however, we often find shared meanings within a group, a phenomenon known as intersubjectivity. Most Christians would agree that the cruciform is a meaningful symbol of suffering and hope. Most members of the Harley Davidson owners group, known as HOGS, would agree that their annual meetups are meaningful events, celebrating a machine that has come to mean freedom, America, and the rebel.

Incorporating meaning into the core of your offering should be a key part of your innovation and design work. It adds powerful shared context for experiences and creates deeply meaningful experiences for customers through use. However, a central part of this is the shared experience that customers have through use as part of a feeling of togetherness. If we want the experiences we design for to be meaningful and increase value for our customers, then we have to infuse our actual service experiences with shared meaningful cultural material. We need to go from me to we.

Worshipping at the Temple of WE

As much as we would like to think of ourselves as individuals, our individuality can be assessed only in its relation to everybody else and to society at large. We are in reality driven by relations and our connections to others.

The mantra of big data is that it makes it possible to target and personalize information to a fine degree so that our consumption can be tailored to us and we can get exactly what we want. The truth, however, is that at the moment, this is so coarsely targeted that we get ads based on what we have already bought (do I need to buy another toaster straight after researching and buying one?), or we get targeted ads that are still way off the mark (Simon recently bought some new speakers, and I searched the net to see what they look like; now, I can’t avoid seeing them on every site I go to). Understanding peoples needs from their data, and individualizing for them, is incredibly difficult.

However, there is another approach that offers immense value to customers, and delivers what people deeply need—meaningful, shared experiences.

What we are witnessing is a move from the “me” in consumption to the “we” of shared experiences. Consumers are actively seeking out shared meaningful experiences and this represents real opportunities for value creation. Companies that deliver meaningful experiences will be the winners in the next decade. We are actively seeking the kinds of experiences Tony and I had on May 9, 1987, and are willing to pay for them, because they add meaning to our everyday. We are social animals, and recent research shows that the greatest influence on our happiness and longevity is related more to what we do with others than our diets or the amount we exercise.3

This shared “we” can be harnessed for areas outside big events and/or religion. In fact, the mechanisms can be decoded and used for everything from banking services to public transport. It’s about celebrating a sense of self via others, gaining meaning, and belonging to something bigger (see Figure 9-3).

You Just Couldn’t Make It Up. Or Could You…

Many of the things we consider eternal and authentic traditions have been invented. Two good examples of this are the Scottish kilt and the Pledge of Allegiance.

In their well-researched 1983 book The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press), Hobsbawn and Ranger highlight how the item of clothing we now know as the kilt was invented. It was the Englishman Thomas Rawlinson who first designed the kilt, to prevent his factory workers from getting the rough rags that they wore stuck in machines. But at this stage the kilt was a neutral-colored, cheap piece of clothing; there was no tartan. The tartan patterns were invented by industrialists to fit a sweeping romanticism started by Sir Walter Scott in the early 1800s. Together, this combination turned the relatively new invention of the kilt into a symbol of the ancient garb of the Highlanders that later became embedded in history.

The rituals, symbols, and stories that were created around an invented garment for the purpose of Scottish identity show how traditions can be fabricated and have lasting power not just over years but over centuries.

Now, the kilt feels as authentic and ancient as the hills of the Highlands themselves. When it is worn, not least at festivals, it becomes part of meaningful experiences for wearers and others in the community (see Figure 9-4).

The other example is the Pledge of Allegiance ritual played out each morning in US schools across the country. The Pledge of Allegiance was penned by Christian pastor Francis Bellamy in 1892 to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus on the shores of America.4 It was conceived as a patriotic drive among school kids and was published in the magazine Youth Interest, encouraging children and their schools to affirm their allegiance to the American flag. To do this, the school would need to buy a flag. Luckily, the magazine also sold American flags. The ritual was good for patriotism but also good for business.

The Pledge of Allegiance was designed for commercial gain, but it succeeded because it gave meaning at the right time. During this period, immigration to the US was changing the country’s demographic and character, which caused a push to reaffirm a sense of “Americanness” among citizens. The Pledge of Allegiance arrived at just the right moment. Timing is everything with such things (a point that Claire Dennington takes up in Chapter 10).

Such invented symbols and rituals can be found across the globe, from National Days like Singapore’s, which only dates back to the mid-1960s, to the Olympics, invented in the early 1900s, with all its pomp and ritual performance. Some symbols, rituals, and myths that deliver on meaningful experiences are also borrowed. Where I live in Norway, the Halloween tradition is only around 15 years old, but it has become established as a traditional high point in autumnal calendars with all the consumer ritual trappings borrowed from our American cousins.

If others can invent rituals, so can you. The experience-centric organization understands how to invent tradition, create myths, design rituals, and use symbols. You understand the huge potential that lies in creating deeper meaning through this process.

Myths, Rituals, and Symbols

In this section I’ll give some further explanation to show how myths, rituals, and symbols are relevant to the experience-centric organization, to prevent you from thinking of religion and/or ancient civilizations. They are important to Apple and Harley Davidson, and they need to be important to you too.

When we think of myths, we often think they mean that something is untrue. However, in fields like sociology, myths are understood as stories that a community tells about itself, that speak to a very real sense of who its members think they are. They are not lies; they are shared metaphors of group identity. Myths, therefore, are potent devices in connecting people and helping create meaningful experiences. Myths also have a tendency to be heroic.

Harley Davidson is built around a hero myth. The brand is about the spirit of freedom, of America, of the outlaw and the rebel. This narrative helps the Harley Davidson community construct its identity and bonds people together and to the brand. The Harley myth is not based on a lie, but at the same time, it is not totally true either. It is a shared story, that is strongly believed in, pieced together from many small truths and placed in a relevant context for our times. Myths are very powerful—just ask the Marlboro Man.

Rituals, on the other hand, allow us to perform these identity myths. They are passageways to meaningful experiences that include anticipation and delivery using strong emotional engagement. Recent research from Harvard shows that a small ritual before eating makes the food taste better.5

Rituals transport us to changed states. A wedding transforms a bachelor to a husband. A simple handshake moves us from strangers to acquaintances. Graduation rituals put a spotlight on our meaningful achievements, but also act as rites of passage from student life to professional life: the event is full of symbolic acts (e.g., handshakes, songs, speeches, and processions) and symbolic objects (such as scrolls of paper and mortarboard hats).

Symbols are representative for people and for communities as an indication of who they think they are and their bond. I recently stopped and chatted with a stranger in the center of Oslo because he was wearing a Burnley football shirt. The shirt was a symbol of his connection to the club and in turn a symbolic bond between us. Two people of different generations and different nationalities found kinship over a symbol, and all the meaning that lies behind it. Community is not just about belonging to a local place, but can also be about connection to other forms of identity.

Picture how thin our experiences would be without myths, rituals, and symbols. Imagine removing origin myths and narratives about ancestors, elders, and kids from our families. They have been embellished over the years and construct a picture of who we are and what bonds us together. Imagine removing anniversary rituals, Sunday dinners, birthdays, and high season celebrations. Imagine having no family heirlooms that are symbolic of important moments in the family’s history, both ancient and modern.

This material is all around us. It can also be invented and borrowed, and you can design with it to create fantastic impact. Let’s see how it can be systematically applied to deliver increased value for your customers.

The Design for Meaningful Experiences Method

The Design for Meaningful Experiences, or D4Me, method is a structured approach to understanding and using the cultural material described in the previous pages. The method has been tried and tested in areas as diverse as professional football, telecoms, and the financial sector, and formed the basis of a national strategy for tourism in Norway.

It has four stages (illustrated on the next page):

1. Cultural scoping and mapping
2. Translation into meaning
3. Designing the offering as a service myth
4. Designing the experiential journey as a ritual journey through meaningful service encounters

I have found the method to be a strong add-on to the wheel of experience centricity described in Chapter 3, although it is an approach for organizations that already have some degree of experiential maturity.

Stage 1: Cultural Scoping and Mapping

Cultural scoping and mapping helps you to identify important cultural elements that are relevant for your market. Once you’ve identified them, you map to identify the materials to design your experiential offering and find key transition points in the service that will make it stand out. Once this is done, you design in detail for its delivery. This all sounds logical and linear, but like all design work, it follows the design thinking approach of being a mix of iterations, messiness, and repeatedly zooming in and out (this is explained in Chapter 4).

Cultural scoping is a bit like going to the optician for an eye test. The big letters are the larger shared cultural elements that are easy for anyone to read, but the smaller letters need a few different lenses and some expertise to help you get things into focus.

Cultural scoping is a form of actor mapping in some ways, but it’s more about the layers of culture and identifying with communities. Understanding these layers also makes it easier to understand where you will draw from to map cultural material.

The output of cultural scoping is a clearly defined cultural focus area. Once you have done this, you can go into detail and start mapping symbols, narratives, and anxieties:

Symbols mapping

If you assemble the symbols from a ritual such as a graduation ceremony, then you can analyze them to understand their meaning. Some of the symbols are more meaningful than others; in the graduation ritual, the mortarboard, gowns, and roll of paper are perhaps the most distinctive and specific. The handshake and processions become important only when connected to the other symbols. By mapping these symbols and their relationship, we start to gather meaningful material to design with, but we also start to see an emerging narrative or myth that can be understood by others. This process will also help you identify where there are no existing symbols, opening opportunities for design.

Narrative mapping

What are the pervading stories and myths that seem to whirl around certain cultural groups or ideas? What are they telling us about that group’s identity? In the case of Apple, the stories about Steve Jobs are telling us about a unique individual who dared to think differently, who was a renegade, a creator. These are still pervasive “myths” (and I use the term as a sociologist might) that many Mac users feel also represent them and their creative identity.

Anxiety mapping

Anxiety mapping can help you find narratives that are used to alleviate anxiety, and that create a kind of equilibrium through their telling. These anxieties are often present in society, but are rarely explicitly expressed. Instead they are commented on, indirectly, through media, art, and journalism. Holt and Cameron, in their 2010 book Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands (Oxford University Press), suggested that in the early 1960s comfortable, middle-class suburban American men turned to the myth created around Jack Daniel as the frontier original male in response to their own anxiety and sense of emasculation due to their comfortable living. At the time, this was not part of everyday conversation, but it was referenced in TV, journalism, art, and literature. It could be argued that the strategy to alleviate this anxiety worked. Now Jack Daniel’s is the best-selling spirit in the world, and the brand was valued by Interbrand in 2016 at $5,332 million.

Let’s look at an example of some work my company did with a Norwegian bank that, for the sake of anonymity, I’ll call Scandinavian Nordic.

Scandinavian Nordic has a service called Royal Gold (also a pseudonym). It is a privilege service for customers with incomes over an upper threshold or considerable savings. The service provides better rates, care, queue prioritization, and offers than those provided to standard customers. The reason the bank cited for why these customers receive better treatment was pretty blunt (to paraphrase): “Because you earn lots of money we’ll treat you nicer than standard customers.” This immediately seemed to clash with the traditional Norwegian aversion to privilege (though this is changing). In addition, many of the customer journeys designed by the bank were rather functional and did not give a Royal Gold user experience.

We undertook cultural mapping to look at Norwegians’ attitudes toward privilege in general, and banking privilege (albeit within the larger Norwegian perspective). Through narrative mapping it became clear that Norway’s long-held values and historical cultural sense of self still influence social attitudes. This sense of self is influenced by Norway’s history as a Lutheran society with a “non-flashy” Protestant work ethic and the distinctly Norwegian and untranslatable Jante Loven (a term that describes culturally understood rules of not feeling or expressing that you are better than anyone else).

Stage 2: Translation into Meaning

When we analyzed the cultural symbols, we started to get an idea that privilege in the Norwegian narrative was not about wealth but about hard work and social contribution. This meaning was extracted from the narratives, symbols, and anxieties that we had collected, and each supported the others. This gave us a strong indication that the meaning we needed to work with lay with the Norwegian cultural conflict with the definition of privilege.

In mapping symbols of privilege in a banking context, we found that in Norway there were no clear intersubjective symbols. When we ran a similar process in the context of professional football, we found a rich canvas of symbols that spoke volumes about national, player, and supporter sense of self. In banking this was a little more limited. We would in the end borrow symbols of privilege from other contexts, but I will tell you about that shortly.

What was clear from the mapping exercise was a growing anxiety that a national sense of self was being eroded by increased selfishness and materialism. This could be seen in a TV drama that ridiculed privilege in West End Oslo, in a reality show that followed rich kids, and in countless newspaper articles that worried about Norway’s new anonymous upper class.

This gave us material to be able to develop a service myth that could fit well with the Norwegian sense of self as a community, but could also act as a narrative to soothe the nerves of a nation facing an identity crisis (or at least for the wealthy customers who the Royal Gold service is for).

Stage 3: Designing the Offering as a Service Myth

How do you design a myth?

Well, as luck would have it (or thanks to the endeavor of tireless scholars), there seem to have been only a handful of great narratives through the ages, albeit told in the distinctive style of the cultures that produced them. Scholars differ as to the exact number, but Christopher Booker argues that there are just seven great narratives that all cultures tell in one form or another: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth.6 These narratives seem to capture much of the human condition and experience in seven plots. They are therefore useful as a starting point to develop a service myth that fits with what the symbols and narratives you have mapped tell you about the consumer community you are developing experiences for. You may also find other possible inspiring story lines if you just do a Google search for ‘“great plot lines.”

There is no hard-and-fast science to choosing the right myth. It comes from the material identified during the cultural mapping process together with what fits your experiential DNA. As the service myth starts to emerge, use your experiential DNA as a means to help you clarify it further: the myth has to fit with that DNA as well as with the cultural context. In fact, you will tell the myth in the style of your organization.

Let’s go back to the Scandinavian Nordic banking example to describe how we developed the service myth.

As the cultural mapping made things clearer, it seemed that we needed to find a service myth that could encapsulate and make peace with a concept of Norwegian privilege. We felt that a variation of the rags-to-riches story would work well for this purpose. The narrative tells the story of a poor protagonist who acquires, for example, power, wealth, and a mate before losing it all and gaining it back upon growing as a person, when they really appreciate the value of what they have acquired. This theme was adapted to become a service myth of Norwegian privilege for those qualified to use the Royal Gold service, while still reflecting brand values:

You’ve worked hard and been smart. You will be rewarded and shown the appreciation that you deserve. You have success that transcends money, and you understand the value of what this success brings. Scandinavian Nordic understands this, too, and appreciates the fact that you have chosen us to look after your finances.

This contrasted starkly with: “Because you earn lots of money we’ll treat you nicer than standard customers.”

Creating a service myth in the D4Me process forms the basis for your offering, and for creating meaningful service encounters as part of the ritual experiential journey. This is where the service myth plays out, using many of the symbols that you have collected as part of the mapping process, together with ones designed specifically for your offering. But before you develop these, you need to identify key transition points where these meaningful service encounters can be designed.

Stage 4: Designing the Experiential Journey as a Ritual Journey Through Meaningful Service Encounters

Arise, Sir Lancelot!

Rituals act as passageways to meaning and thresholds into a heightened experiential state. Examples in a service context could be picking up a new car, signing a contract, upgrading a service, receiving a package, checking in and checking out, leaving a service, renewing a lease, and more—the list is potentially endless. Rituals, therefore, have the potential to change an ordinary service encounter into a meaningful service encounter (or MSE for short).

Rituals give meaningful structure to time, and have three phases: separation, transition, and reincorporation. Each has a purpose with regard to moving people emotionally to something meaningful and then cementing it in their memory. Separation works as a way to leave something behind and to build up anticipation. Transition is the core of the experience and should be full of symbols and meaningful actions. Reincorporation is about reaffirming the experience and bringing people back to the everyday, albeit changed by their experience.

Rituals can be grand rites of passage, and they can also be small, everyday actions and interactions. Handshakes are good examples of these smaller happenings. We separate by opening our hand to the other person, we are in transition while our hands come together in a shake, and we reincorporate when our hands are retracted. Voilà! We are together!

The grander rites of passage, such as weddings, graduations, and awards ceremonies, also follow the three phases of separation, transition, and reincorporation, and are filled with chains of smaller rituals and meaningful interactions that further build and energize the experience. These are the basis for developing MSEs.

This means that when we design for MSEs using ritual structures, we can go big or we can go small, and sometimes both. Nested chains of MSEs can be used for grand experiences, or just a handful might be used to add meaning to a shorter experiential journey. Whatever we choose, we are designing for deep and significant meaning that transcends the superficial.

Going back to the example of Royal Gold, we designed ritual into the experiential journey. This service experience was designed as a ritual journey with the three phases of separation, transition, and reincorporation, but one that also included a build-up period of “before” and a phase “after” the service experience. This resulted in a five-act ritual journey. This experience would be constructed around a chain of eight meaningful service encounters that would build anticipation and meaning into the onboarding process.

This was supplemented by the use of strong and clear symbols. We had found during the cultural mapping process that the current service did not have anything that connected banking to a Norwegian sense of privilege. Therefore, we decided to make the (Royal Gold) credit card a symbol of privilege and to use the touchpoint of a carefully designed letter as a central symbolic representation of ascension in status. The communication strategy, designed for the before phase of the customer journey, would connect the receipt of the letter and the letter itself to something meaningful as a symbol of Norwegian privilege, while still setting the tone of the service myth.

The separation phase would be kick-started with the MSE of receiving a letter whose beautiful design is intended to communicate its importance. It would officially invite the customer to become a Royal Gold member, because they have earned membership due to their hard work and endeavor. After this, a series of smaller MSEs would lead to a transition phase that included card-cutting ceremonies and artifacts, and a one-time embellished login process. The experience was brought to a close with a reincorporation ceremony that allowed for assembly, gifting, and emphasis on the meaning of the experience.

The resulting design did not require great funds from the bank to deliver the new service journey, only reordering, re-emphasis, and slight redesign of certain artifacts. The main expense was the introduction and subsequent establishment of a physical letter that would communicate new meaning about the value of an invitation to be part of the service.

Conclusion/Reincorporation

Before I close this chapter and you can be reincorporated into the rest of this book, I’d like to reflect on the use of this process.

Whether it’s riding a Harley, dressing up in cosplay costumes, gathering for openings of Apple Stores, or just singing with total strangers at a football game, consumers are finding important meaning, joy, and significant connections with others through shared consumption. They demonstrate ritual behavior, tell myths about their favorite brands, and use experiential offerings. Facilitating for such experiences through design is something that should increasingly become part of the experience-centric organization.

Using the D4Me method will help you understand, find, and design the meaningful into your offerings and services. This will connect people to each other and to you, and provides heightened and more memorable experiences. By using broader cultural mechanisms such as rituals, myths, and symbols, you can tap into effective ways to influence experiences and build a stronger connection with your customers.

Having said this, it is not about manipulating customers, it is about using cultural mechanisms to improve their experiences and create shared mutual value. Customers are looking for shared meaningful experiences, and the question is whether you can provide them. It is not for us to judge if people find meaning through what they consume.

D4Me is about giving customers the opportunity to use established cultural concepts in a way that connects them to your experiential DNA. If your solution doesn’t fit with your experiential DNA, or is out of step with culture, then it will feel inauthentic and forced. Therefore, it is important that the meaningful experiences you design for are considered genuine. In this way you provide exceptional and memorable customer experiences that both use and strengthen your experiential DNA and create mutual value. This distinguishes you from your competition and creates sustainable competitive advantage, and value for your customers, while cementing your role as an experience-centric organization.