Interactions - November/December 2008

we no longer have the luxury of ignoring it, as organizations, individuals, or as a planet. The competition for resources in all of the forms of capital listed above is now so fierce that all organizations need to address how their strategy intersects with sustainability. However, this is not merely a safeguard against scarcity or competition. Besides being a business imperative, sustainability is a source of tremendous opportunity. Most businesspeople only truly understand the first two types of capital, and the importance of conserving, expanding, and caring for them. One of the problems in the business world is that we measure success only in terms of money. This is often liberating of larger responsibilities but can lead to irresponsible behavior and results—many of which come back to haunt organizations anyway.

As Hunter Lovins, one of the authors of Natural Capitalism, likes to say, “we’re managing the planet’s resources like a fire sale.” There are both ethical and operational reasons why organizations of all types (including nonprofits and governments) need to be paying more attention to all capital resources available to us. And, we don’t have to become experts in sustainability before we start operating with this mind-set.

What Does Innovation Have to Do With Meaning? One of the challenges most organizations struggle with is in differentiating novel innovation from meaningful innovation. Meaning is a specific attribute of customer experiences that represents the deepest level of

significance that customers connect between offerings and their lives. Along the same spectrum of significance as emotions and values, and meaning is the most powerful aspect of customer experience. It can transcend traditional and “rational” price and performance decisions. It surrounds all products, services, and events, whether we acknowledge and address it or not. And it can be the most effective guide for organizations to use in determining whether an idea or solution is truly valuable and not merely “new.”

Before you think that meaning (and values and emotions, for that matter) are applicable only to “consumer” offerings, let me remind you that despite protests to the contrary, all customers, even “business” customers, are people and, as such, issues of emotions, values, and meaning are just as powerful players in these relationships. My father, a swimming-pool contractor for most of his life, used to say that “you can sell anything to a salesperson.” He meant that people in sales who built relationships by triggering emotions, values, and meanings in their customer were often the most susceptible to these very same elements. Just because a customer is another businessperson, this doesn’t insulate them from being influenced by the often subconscious and irrational aspects of evaluation and decision making. Many businesspeople, in fact, can easily cite examples where decisions were made that either downplayed or downright ignored rational issues of price and performance.

Meaning is an attribute of
experience that describes how

people understand the world around them. Though core meanings are universal—across all cultures—our prioritization and expression of them represent opportunities for organizations to forge connections with customers at the deepest and strongest point possible. This becomes a metric with which to measure the appropriateness of innovative solutions.

The most effective innovation focuses past price and performance and instead starts at meaning, working outward toward the details most companies begin with. In this way, organizational strategy can align all efforts at the deepest connection point with customers, allowing the rest of the tactical decisions to better support these connections. Not only does this create more significant innovations, but it does so in less time with fewer resources—since the focus is always on meaning, throughout development.

“Meaning research” should be an integrated part of customer research. This is key data that should affect corporate strategy for your organizations and clients. Then, corporate strategy can start reflecting customer meaning. This is the first step toward specifying the right offerings (the right business to be in). As meaning becomes an integrated, accepted part of the development process, organizations can naturally focus on the right offerings and make them as great as possible.