Built to Love: Creating Products That Captivate Customers

Leading companies do more than produce things that work better. Their products and services make customers feel better. They create captivating products that energize the marketplace and set the standard for what customers want and expect. But this isn’t something you can add on after the fact. Your products and services must be built to love from the very start. This book tells you why and shows you how.

Peter Boatwright and Jonathan Cagan have worked with market-leading companies ranging from Fortune 100 corporations to niche firms in a variety of industries. They’ve found that for companies to form deep bonds with customers, emotions must be generated by a product itself—trying to associate emotions with a product simply through advertising is unreliable, expensive, and ultimately ineffective. They marshal stock market data that proves the bottom-line benefit of high-emotion products, as well as data showing that people are willing to pay more for products with emotionally rich features.

After demonstrating that authentic product emotion really does pay off, Boatwright and Cagan move on to how—how emotion can be broken down into its core building blocks, how it can then be used to develop new products and services, and how product touch points, in particular visual touch points, deliver those emotions. Emotion can be built into any product or service—a point vividly illustrated through case studies from a variety of industries.

Emotion is fundamental to all that is human, including the products we enjoy. Built to Love offers a clear method and a set of tools to help you gain loyal, even fanatical customers by going beyond mere efficiency and speaking to people’s deepest needs and wants.

Peter Boatwright is Associate Professor of Marketing, with an appointment in Mechanical Engineering, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
Jonathan Cagan is the George Tallman and Florence Barrett Ladd Professor in Mechanical Engineering, with appointments in the School of Design and Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University.