This Element is an excerpt from Do You Matter?: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company (ISBN: 9780137142446) by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery. Available in print and digital formats.

Use design to build products, services, and experiences that truly matter to your customers’ lives...that they can’t live without!

If someone polled your customers, constituents, followers, and asked if you matter, how would you come out? This is really a soul-searching question we want you to ask yourself. Does your company matter to your consumers? Really, honestly answer that. If you disappeared, would their lives would be less?