Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences

TwoThe Value of Meaning

Before going forward we must grapple with these two rather abstract terms: experience and meaning. Our brief recap in the previous chapter suggests that, at one level, the historical record of innovation is the story of companies progressively deepening their understanding of human needs and how their businesses can respond to those needs with goods and services. Over the course of the past century, this understanding progressed from meeting consumers' functional and economic requirements, through the emergence of choice and competition, culminating in the use of branding to address customers' desire for identity and, most recently, connections at the level of meaning. By mid-20th century, branding had become the essence ...