DESIGN AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: EMBODYING A NEW MEANING INTO A NEW SERVICE SOLUTION

The Innovation of Meaning is a framework that aims at innovating the “reason why” people use a product or service. However, research is limited to its strategic generation phase, lacking an understanding about how to embody the new meaning into a conceptualization of the new solution. Moreover, the dominant existent approaches come from the design disciplines, which are founded upon opposite principles (outside-in vs inside-out). This research leverages on an experiment with 77 managers from 33 Italian retailers that has been designed to explore a new approach in the definition of the concept for radical innovation of meaning. Given the intangible and heterogeneous nature of services makes the meaning even more subject to individual interpretations, our research is focused on the service industry. In particular we tested the new approach in the retail industry, for which innovation of meaning could provide ways out from current turbulent landscape. Findings indicate that the service concept needs to be simple and to focus on one specific element (moment) in the customer journey. This “Moment of Meaning” takes the role of a metaphor for the entire service and allows for a coherent but flexible operationalization of the new meaning strategy into the customer