Over the past few years, advertising pundits have been warning clients and colleagues that consumers tune-out ads and don’t believe what advertisers are telling them. Johan Liedgren, in Advertising Age online, warned recently that the ad industry “is hooked on delivering messages that come from wishful thinking about brand positioning to an audience that doesn’t expect much from us.” His advice is to communicate “brand qualities that are truthful, relevant and sincere.”¹

Not only have people tuned-out advertising, they have closed their minds to messages from formerly trusted sources. Think about: “We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,”² “Read my lips, no new taxes”³ and “In defiance of pledges to the United Nations, Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons.”⁴

Hollywood movie studios are in trouble because they gamble on content; the costs of labor, promotion, production and distribution are over the top; and their business model, marketing spending and distrust of digital technology are ruining them. They face an increasingly technology-savvy audience who can choose to watch movies on their cell phones, video iPods, TV screens or computers, or abandon movies altogether in favor of games or Second Life. David Denby, New Yorker movie critic quotes the essence, “We have the resources to tell the public what it wants to see.”⁵ The problem for the studios is not the proliferation of delivery platforms, it is their attitudes. The decision to focus on audiences and delivering experiences uniquely defined by platforms is an idea that has spread because of its intrinsic value.

A focus on the consumer experience is spreading like a virus through the business world, creating jobs for designers who understand business, technology and behavioral trends. In some companies, designers concerned with the user experience with organizations, products, services and events, have stepped into the breach—created by years of “less than truthful, relevant and sincere” messages—to deliver authenticity. In some established companies, experience design is an entrepreneurial start-up, like design once was.

Hewlett-Packard is one such company where cross-functional teams of thinkers from interactive and usability design collaborate with partners who have classic industrial and visual design, design planning, marketing, technology skills to develop experience design methodology. At the same time, experience designers are educating program managers and selling their ideas to internal partners. To be effective, presentation and persuasion are as important as creative design. The focus on experience design at HP means driving a cultural transformation of an engineering culture while encountering and learning to overcome pockets of resistance.

Traveling to Davos, Switzerland, Bruce Nussbaum blogged, “We are moving through a vast cultural change that involves shifting from The Voice of Authority to The Voice of Understanding. Listening and understand[ing]—connecting and communicating—are the key skills of business culture today and the essence of leadership. If you don’t get this—and many CEOs being fired these days clearly don’t—you don’t get the 21st century of social networking, disaggregated power and co-creation.”⁶

The diverse customer-focused team in an organization responsible for developing, orchestrating and implementing total customer experience strategy and brand building works at the intersection of business, design, marketing and technology strategies. Designers work well at this intersection because of their comfort level and ability to deal with ambiguity, and to use design thinking to generate concepts against focused objectives.