Design and the customer experience: The challenge of embodying new meaning in a new service

Innovation of Meaning (IoM) is a framework that aims to innovate the “reason why” people use a product or service. However, as current research is limited to the strategic generation phase, and we lack an understanding of how to embody new meaning in a new solution. This gap is critical, as development teams may pursue a reinterpretation of meaning strategy, causing the perceived meaning to substantially differ from the one strategically conceived. Moreover, the current dominant approaches derive from the design disciplines, which are founded on the opposite principles (outside-in vs inside-out). This study presents a new conceptual method in line with the core principles of the IoM framework, testing its effectiveness through an experiment with 77 managers from 33 Italian retailers. The findings indicate that the service concept needs to be simple and focused on one specific element (moment) in the customer journey. This “Moment of Meaning” takes the role of a metaphor for the whole service, and allows a coherent but flexible operationalization of the new meaning strategy in the customer experience.