Customer Reviews

Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

loved the book. a great, informative read. as a college student currently studying design+management at parsons, this book made me excited about my future. here are some highlights:

1. Footworks:
In the book, the authors develop a ficticious company, Footworks, which they use to build examples from. This is a cool method to teach because you can watch Footworks grow throughout the progression of the book. You can also visualize how their ideas would really be implemented within a company.

2. Defining Innovation Culture:
They build an innovation team, and speak about every person making up that team. They talk about their importance of creating meaningful experiences, their responsibilities within the company and why they should be on the team. These are some of the people:
Brand Management, Sales Management, Information Tech (IT), Human Resources (HR), CEO, Marketing Management and Research, Design and Development.

3. I think the most important of all is how they really deal with defining "meaning" which is something that took me a couple chapters to really grasp. They speak about how important it is for businesses to really figure out which meaningful experiences their customers value. Then it breaks into delivering that experience which really connects on a personal level making them integrate that experience into their lives. A meaningful experience would be how a vegetarian FEELS when he / she practices vegetarianism.

4. There's psychology involved, which goes past working with products and services into for example, deciding whether the new CEO of your company should be male or female and whether or not they're athletic. "Just as tribes, traditions, and objects brought order and `rightness' to people in previous centuries, a company and it's offerings may now play that role as well by solidifying a relationship at the deepest possible point in the human psyhce and personality. It's a potent place for a company to be".

I picked up this book at CES and read it from beginning to end. The authors' present an intriguing theory and they back it up with very detailed explanations of "how to." Well worth the money and $$ for anyone looking to innovate in a crowded marketplace.

As a professional who helps companies succeed by connecting with their audiences through branding, I highly recommend Making Meaning. In today's world, those managers who truly understand that "it's all about the customer and their experience with your products, your services, your organization", will be the ones left standing. Great book...a must read!

Creating a meaningful customer experience is challenging and a hard concept for non-marketers to grasp. This book is a practical tool that will enable people across the entire organization to start exploring what meaningful experiences are about in an 'easy-to-understand' manner. Even though the creation of a truly meaningful and integrated experience would most likely require outside help, this book gets you underway by providing common terminology and a framework that can start guiding the collective thought process. I highly recommend it.

shedroff &co build an interesting bridge between design and corporate communications. by emphasizing the importance of metaphor in all communications the authors offer an abstracted layer of value; a value that is worth something to both seller and buyer, to both employed and employer. it's the value of metaphor. and to you as the reader it will be a great read if you're interested in expanding your views and skills into new fields where communication with customers is important.

If you've been following Nathan Shedroff's work to build a conceptual framework for experience design then you will find this book to be his next step, but with an emphasis on meaningful experiences. The book presents the business strategy and design process. It is of little help directly for actually designing anything and that information wouldn't fit into the same book anyway. Such help only exists by studying ethnography, social and environmental psychology, neurology, product design, and so forth.

Books that I would recommend along with this one are "The Meaning of Things" by Csikszentmihalyi, "The Cultural Animal" by Baumeister, "Emotional Design" by Norman, and whatever product design liturature you can find for your field. If you aren't an ethnographer then you should acquire the basics and there are several books on Amazon to help develop your skills.

While "Making Meaning" is a fine business book and lays out a basic conceptual framework for business, the framework for applied meaning design is not yet developed. For now you will have to figure this out on your own. Designers have stumbled into decent meaning designs in products or adopted existing designs that already have meaning, but if you want to design for a new meaning then you are on your own. The 15 meanings included in this book will help get you started. If you want an excellent example of meaning design I suggest you check the dash of the 2007 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. It is thick with meaning; see if you can find it.

- jim

This book is a great resource for anyone working in marketing or research. Learning how to communicate with consumers in a meaningful way is the key to earning both their respect and their business. The authors' years of experience is synthesized into a concise and practical guide to creating meaningful experiences for consumers, including many specific examples of how "making meaning" actually works. Their suggestions will help to elevate brands to new levels in the eyes of customers.

Some times you buy a book because the title seems relevant to you. Unfortunately i was looking about something rare... a book that helps me to understand how to create meaning for customers.

Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences is a book about understanding and crafting meaning customer experiences for businesses. So what am I doing reading this book?

Well, for starters, I've been taking an interest in web user experience lately in what I've been doing, but my research and exposure had been primarily on the usability aspects. The book puts things in a broader perspective because the experience it is talking comes from a broad gamut of products and services. That approach put brought things "back to basics" because I felt I skipped the part about user & customer experience that on those levels.

Case in point: I've been quite a stickler for the functional and satisfying dimensions of user experiences. I've learned from the book that there are more granular components to the term "user satisfaction." When you think about it, what does it mean when our users are "satisfied" with the website you developed? Are they more happy? Do they have a sense of accomplishment? The book tries teach the reader to make those connections.

Since the book is grounded on the corporate setting, it also talks about how experience design fits in a business enterprise. For the authors, customer experience is designed deliberately and is a part of the innovation processes of a company. The authors also present easy to understand frameworks and case studies to help people implement their own experience design activity. However, this is the point in the book that I found the least interesting, perhaps I have more or less been doing web projects with smaller teams (and little resistance :P)

Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea is a good read for usability folks and web product managers who want to broaden their appreciation of user experience design.

Even though the book has a good aim, and has chosen a very challenging subject that is at most of emerging nature currently, still the authors manage to shoot all over the fence without really delivering anything specific in any of the areas - it feels more like reading a bunch of Introductions.

Nice read through as a speed-read, but was disappointed for my money. It seems like the authors have tried to include everything into their book and haven't been able to kill their babies and scope down into one particular area.

I'd say best use of the book is of inspirational value for your own workings.