How Great Design Makes People Love Your Company

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Easy Rider

It's not all Apple, however. A number of less well known examples round out the argument. Harley-Davidson (HOG) is held up as the model of a company that strives to cultivate relationships with customers and which, more important, would be sorely missed if it disappeared. Its rider events are held up a kind of branding lifeblood: The company boasts revenues of more than $1 billion but spends little more than $2 million annually on traditional advertising. Jones Soda (JSDA), a small but hip soft drink brand with annual revenues of about $40 million, taps into the desires of customers by offering custom-printed labels and flavors, quirky as the results may sometimes be. Brunner and Emery take readers to the aisles of Whole Foods (WFMI) and Target, to BMW dealerships, and to OXO-equipped kitchen counters to show that other companies understand these principles, too.

Although some of the book treads familiar territory, it is saved by timing and utility. The global economic downturn promises to test executives' faith in the power of design. And in some of the book's most interesting passages, Brunner and Emery diagnose the ills of stumbling design-led stars like Starbucks (SBUX) and JetBlue (JBLU). (The former let growth impinge on the total experience, and the latter squandered customers' good will with a series of far-reaching logistics failures.)

More important, this book is insightful and emphatic without being polemical. Brunner and Emery are serious, confident, and seemingly comfortable talking to the executive class, something that is not always the case in similar books. Nor does either seem to have a chip on his shoulder about designers being less important than MBA types, making the resulting text a clear and useful read for the design neophytes of the business world. All told, asking the seemingly egotistical question "do you matter?" proves a compelling place to start a discussion about the role of design in any given business. Brunner and Emery aim to help executives lead the discussion onward from there.

Business Exchange related topics:
Customer Experience
Product Design
Sustainable Design
Marketing Innovation
Reputation Management

Vella is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.