Design drives innovation, innovation powers brand, brand builds loyalty, and loyalty sustains profits

Source: BusinessWeek

I just have to include this short excerpt , merely for the fun of it...

A former editor of Windows magazine, Mike Elgan, illustrated the difference between ordinary brands and charismatic brands in two succinct sentences: "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is famous for a crazy video in which he yells, "I—love—this—company!" In the case of Apple , it's the customers who shout that."

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In the previous century, a little brand loyalty went a long way. Often, what passed for loyalty was merely ignorance. If customers didn't know what their options were, they would stick with the devil they knew..

A company can't will itself to be agile. Agility is an emergent property that appears when an organization has the right mindset, the right skills, and the ability to multiply those skills through collaboration. To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture. You have to encourage an enterprisewide appetite for radical ideas. You have to keep the company in a constant state of inventiveness. It's one thing to inject a company with inventiveness. It's another thing to build a company on inventiveness.

For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts, not just one time but over and over, they'll need to do more than hire designers. They'll need to be designers. They'll need to think like designers, feel like designers, work like designers. The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today's wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.

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