The Umami Strategy Stand Out by Mixing Business with Experience Design

Creating a unique value for your customers is crucial if you want to differentiate in an overcrowded market. To do so, you need to define a powerful strategy that determines consistent action across your organization to deliver your unique flavor. Szóstek describes this strategy as umami, which is the fifth category of taste (besides sweet, sour, salt and bitter), and gives an exceptional flavor to your food.

How do you build a powerful yet actionable strategy, and successfully implement it across your organization? Many leaders, marketers and designers try to answer these questions. The Umami Strategy proposes a novel approach that will help you build and execute an experience strategy. The model used in the book allows you to (a) find out what stories your customers are telling today; (b) uncover motivators and demotivators that guide these stories; (c) envision the ideal future experience you want to deliver; (d) define the actionable measures that will ensure progress toward that vision; and (e) evaluate that progress through future customer stories.

Enjoyable, practical and full of hidden gems and tips, this book will help you get your organization to align with building a unique market value through delivering memorable experiences to your customers. Because to be noticed, you need to stand out of the crowd.

Aga Szóstek, Ph.D. is a strategic designer. For the past two decades she worked at the forefront of combining design, technology and business. She collaborated with brands such as Google, Microsoft, Philips, Canon, Samsung, EY, Santander, ING, Orange and many more, bringing the experience-focused strategic approach to project teams and boardrooms. Her approach inspired many organizations to refocus and bet on experiences as their strategic differentiator.

Next to consulting, Szóstek designs tools aiming to support delivering unique experiences and co-hosts a podcast about creative leadership: Catching The Next Wave. She graduated with her Ph.D. from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, and teaches experience design all around the world from the alternative business school Kaospilot in Denmark to Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand.