Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

There’s a reason the IKEA catalogue comes in sixty-seven versions and thirty-two languages: the company knows that their products are worthless if they don’t fit the context in which customers will use them.

Marketing has gone from this… It turns out that affinity that is earned, not attention that is bought and paid for, is what’s powering business growth now.

The solution lies in following a principle that management consultant Peter Drucker spoke about decades ago: ‘the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer’. Drucker goes as far as to say that the customer is the ‘starting point’ of a business’s purpose.

What companies and entrepreneurs sometimes forget is that the purpose of innovation is not simply to make new, improved products and services; it is to make things that are meaningful to the people who use them.

When we encourage people to believe that something matters, we attract the kind of people who care about that something. Soon buying from us becomes part of their identity—their story. The experience—our posture and products, and the story the business owner is inviting the customer to buy into—is what creates the customer.

Every successful business creates a new kind of customer. That customer’s story changes because the business exists. There is a before-the-product story and an after-the-product story. The change that’s brought about doesn’t have to be as monumental as the changes that companies like Google create; they can be small shifts in attitude and perceptio

We are prepared to trade privacy for significance. But we still want to choose the things we pay attention to and the stories we believe.

The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.

But IKEA’s extensive research can influence product development only so much. Because IKEA’s business model depends on volume, they can’t change their products for different markets. It’s essential, therefore, that the in-store room displays fit each country’s culture. A bedroom in Japan might feature tatami mats and the earthquake beams that go th