Preface

This is a book about emotion. Built to Love celebrates the value that customers get from using products that make them feel great, so great that they begin telling everyone about those products. When designing new products, companies often work really hard to make new products work better than existing ones, missing the opportunity to provide products that make customers feel better. For those companies that do address customer emotions, most do not address emotions through the product itself. Rather, they set their hopes on marketing campaigns, seeking to generate excitement about the product regardless of whether the product will deliver on the promise. This book reveals a different approach, one that provides products that authentically generate emotions customers will value so much that the market lights up with intense interest in and passion for the product.

Built to Love is written for those of you who are executives, who set the vision and direction for your firm, to give you the insights you need to bring out new products that energize your customers. It is also written for marketing managers and product managers, who are responsible for fulfilling customers’ needs and wants, to show you how to increase your market share by satisfying a broader and more vital set of customer desires. Further, we address professionals in the world of product development and design, to help you bring out products that engage customers to the extent that they demand your product and only yours. We also wrote the book for the rest of you who are not in the product development world, but who want to understand how the products you love are developed.

We focus not just on physical products but also on services, software, and brands. We discuss both consumer products and business-to-business products, from large companies and those as small as startups.

Conversations with industry leaders highlighted the need to prove that valued emotions lead to product success, to provide metrics to support your company’s investment in an emotion-based product development process, and to provide a methodology for integrating emotion as a basis for product strategy. This book provides that proof and process.

Built to Love is a result of our research into new product development methods, our experience in consulting with firms to strategize and design new products, and our experience in teaching product development methods and new product marketing.

We celebrate the balance between functional performance and emotional reward, providing clear evidence that emotion pays off. Our scientific studies demonstrate that successfully delivered “product emotions” will result in better company performance and higher perceived value by customers.

To move the theory into practice, we provide a how-to guide for uncovering the emotions that should drive the development of a new product. We also provide insight into how such a product emotion strategy will result in products that people love.

Chapters 1 through 5 begin with why: why product emotion is real, why it is critical to all types of products, and why it is profitable to leverage when developing products in good economic times or bad. We include statistical proof of emotion’s value by examining stock performance of high-emotion companies and how high-emotion features impact the value of individual products. For readers who practice product development, this first part will equip you with arguments that show how product emotions are critical to your future product development efforts.

After showing that authentic emotion really does pay off, we move on to how in Chapters 6 through 10: how emotion can be broken down into its core building blocks, how it is then used to develop new products, and how product touchpoints—in particular visual touchpoints—deliver those emotions. These chapters go on to show how to translate emotions into a strategy to develop products that stimulate emotion in customers, create a buzz about brands, and create a group of passionate and loyal customers. For the practitioners, this second part will present a process to follow in order to design product emotions.

Throughout the book, engaging case studies from a variety of industries will help you understand how to integrate emotion into your products and brands, regardless of the nature of your business.

We have a passion for great products. We appreciate the effort that companies take to make our experience in using their products engaging, pleasurable, and satisfying. Our goal in this book is to help others understand why such emotions are not due to luck but are the result of strategic and skillful product design. Our goal is to help all companies create products that are built to love.