Instantiating the Innovation of Meaning Into the Customer Experience: Lessons From Retail Services

The experiential service innovation is becoming a common competitive arena both for product-oriented (e.g. original brand manufacturers like Apple, Zara, Ikea) and service-oriented (e.g. multi-brand retailers, like Walmart, CVS, Alibaba) companies. Although the literature pertaining to innovation and design provides several contributions that investigate the relationship between innovation of meaning and innovation of technological solution, few studies have tried to examine in depth the competitive dynamics of the radical innovation in the experiential services that requires the embodiment of the new meaning into the design of a specific customer experience solution. In this research, authors explore the nature of interdependencies between different companies competing on the same innovation of meaning in an experiential service context, trying to map the salient patterns that characterize the Front End of Innovation of Meaning in experiential services. Through a multiple case‐study analysis, based on both secondary sources and ethnographic analysis, the authors investigate how the winner emerge between many competitors working on the same direction of Innovation of Meaning and map the activities of the Front End of Innovation for the development of the new customer experience solution. The results of the empirical research suggest that the Moment of Meaning enables the instantiation of an innovation of meaning into the designed solution, being critical in the terms that is the (single or multiple) moment in which customers can interpret a touchpoint or an activity in light of the intended meaning by the retailer.