Dear CEO,

It’s truly amazing the success Apple has had these last few years. I mean, I don’t have to tell you that people just love their stuff. Even their TV commercials give you a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing it’s an Apple ad and every time you’re about to hear an announcement from Jobs you can’t help to think, “Oh, this is going to be good!”.

Sure, they’ve had a few bumps in the road launching Mobile Me and the iPhone 3G, but hey, they’re Apple. Rest assured, they’ll fix it. Their products are also not cheap, but they’re just too good to pass up. And anyhow, when you’re a Mac user you wouldn’t think of buying anything else!

How’s your brand doing these days? If your IKEA, Amazon.com, BMW or another design-driven company you’re probably doing pretty well. Have you read that new book that just came out, “Do You Matter? How Design Will Make People Love Your Company”? It’s a good one.

Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn here—since I am a designer by trade—but they make some good points in the book about design-driven companies and Apple’s success. One of the most important points they make is that you can’t maintain a business based just on spread sheets alone. This might sound a bit abstract to someone like you coming from a numbers background, but customers actually develop an emotional connection to a brand through touch-points or anything recognizable from your company that enters their five senses—everything from your logo to a customer support call.

The problem is you can’t quantify how someone “feels” about a product, service or brand. It gets even fuzzier when you consider that you don’t define your brand, the customer does. They do it, as an unpopular president would say, “in their hearts and minds.”

So how do you support a business on fuzzy math?

The authors Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery state:

“In business we tend to shy away from most things emotional. We’d prefer to rationalize, measure, process, and systematize. Ironically, we tend to put faith in things that are decidedly not humanistic: Science. Math. Machines. When the going gets gray, we sprint for black or white. But to be great at design, you need embrace the human condition and recognize that when it’s all said and done, this is what will you serve you the best.”

The best way is by creating experiences that your customers love, and design is the most direct route to enabling this. In other words, in order to have success you need to design the right experience.

“Schultz [Starbucks Founder and CEO] didn’t think he was in the coffee business, he was in the experience business, and the portal into that experience was a better cup of coffee in a carefully designed atmosphere.”

So how do you create the right experience? Well, it just so happens to that designers are pretty good at this. Many of us have built careers on not just building great customer experiences but being receptive to customer’s needs, desires, frustrations and pleasures. Not only are we concerned with how something functions but how it makes customers feel—their emotional response.

Designers at the end of the day ask, “OK, but how does the customer actually feel about the experience.” Where are the points of friction? Where is the sense of ease? Where is the soul of the product and how do we ensure that we don’t cut it out because we’d like to save an extra $.50 on manufacturing costs?

“You have to ask ‘What are the boundary conditions around that design that are going to break it if we keep trying to pull things out?’ The risk here is you take the soul out of the product. It takes a soft skill set, more of an art than a science, a sort of ‘just knowing’ what it is that’s making the product great and where those boundaries are. And, of course, that’s what makes most left-brain business people more than a little nervous.”

It makes them nervous because you can’t quantify a feeling, right? Fuzzy math indeed. The designer is not only an expert at reading people’s emotions but he or she also has many tools at his disposal to confirm what he suspects.

Take Web design for instance—when designing a better customer experience for an e-commerce site a strategic design process might include creating personas based on the target audience and putting them through different scenarios and tasks. Next, the designer might build a prototype and take the time to sit down and watch people go through the website noting frustrations, surprises or any mental hurdles. At the end, they might even ask “How did you feel after doing x,y,z?”

As designers, we take this kind of information, analyze it and apply it. We know that good design is an iterative process and that it requires constant vigilance and refinements.

This brings me to the last point, shouldn’t all company’s have a CDO (Chief Design Officer) or equivalent? Someone with the background and authority to help direct a company on all matters of design that effect the customer experience? Someone who can gauge your customer’s emotional response to your product and make iterative changes where needed? Think of what the American auto industry could do with a CDO?

I’ll leave the last word to S. Jobs (CDO, Apple):

“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies…You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

And so it goes…