CHAPTER 1
Product Emotions

We have all seen large “big-rig” trucks rambling down the interstate. Each of those 40,000-pound vehicles is a small business on wheels, driven by an employee or by the business owner himself. For trucks, as with other small businesses, business profits require efficiency. Fuel-cost increases have made profit margins slimmer than ever before, and weight restrictions (on the whole truck—cab and trailer) mean that every pound counts. Money is made delivering payload, so the weight in the cab is minimal, maximizing payload weight.

The truck is not only a business, but is also a home—a very small home, roughly the floor area of a two-person tent, a mini room in which the driver needs to sleep, eat, and change clothes, and also watch movies, read, play video games, and do deskwork. There is no separate living and sleeping area, no place to change or freshen up, few places to store belongings, and no place to prepare even a sandwich. This is where the driver spends his time while on the road.

The more that goes into that home to make the driver’s life better, the more it both costs and weighs, reducing business efficiency. Long-haul truck interiors have therefore been designed as efficient, lightweight spaces with minimal creature comforts, allowing drivers just enough space for sleep so they can get back on the road. Even for those U.S. drivers who own their vehicle and sacrifice some fuel economy for the classic look of an American truck, the vehicle interior remains sparse.

What had been overlooked, or not recognized as important, was the opportunity to design the truck interior to be more than an efficient business tool. The drivers consider themselves professionals, making sacrifices to be away from family and friends. The life of a trucker can be tedious, lonely, and uncomfortable. Employee turnover is greater than 100 percent per year among fleet drivers, which means that drivers’ lifestyle needs are significant to the industry.

In 2008, Navistar’s International Truck, a longstanding brand that had become known only as a basic workhorse, introduced LoneStar, a different kind of long-haul truck. New management at Navistar recognized the underlying dual needs of those in the trucking profession: the need to keep costs low with efficient business tools along with the need to transform a monotonous and stressful task into a more comfortable and enjoyable profession. Navistar understood that the trucker longs for family and friends, needs a place to unwind, wants a good night’s sleep, and requires simple, convenient meals. Navistar realized that truck drivers lacked positive emotional experiences on the road. LoneStar answers the duality of truck industry needs, for LoneStar is a paradigm-shifting truck that fulfills emotional desires while also delivering superior performance.

LoneStar is a bold, classic-looking truck, with styling features that hark back to the 1930s and ’40s, while clearly setting a styling trend for the 21st century. Truckers love chrome and LoneStar uses chrome elegantly and plentifully on the exterior, with chrome just about everywhere chrome can be. Its bold, pronounced grille gives the truck command of the road, and pride in the ride.

On the inside, unlike traditional trucks with cramped, spartan living spaces, LoneStar’s interior is more like a cabin in a private jet. Its interior incorporates amenities that have not been available in standard trucks: features for cooking, eating, sleeping, and relaxing. Unlike other trucks with two bunks, there is a full-sized bed in LoneStar; it folds up Murphy-style, revealing a crescent-shaped couch. A kitchenette with food storage, microwave, and refrigerator allows for simple meal preparation, and a pullout table provides space to eat and work. Airline-like overhead storage keeps the cabin neat and organized. Hardwood flooring, a television, and a seven-speaker Monsoon sound system complete the living experience.

The interior design and its features make the driver feel professional, successful, and comfortable, all in a roughly 4-by-7.5-foot space. At the same time that the truck is specifically designed for the trucker’s emotional and lifestyle desires, business needs such as fuel economy were taken seriously. At its introduction, LoneStar was arguably the most fuel-efficient long-haul vehicle on the planet, the most aerodynamic for headwinds and winds from any direction, because winds do come from all directions.

It may be no surprise that Navistar had plenty of pre-orders on the truck. The surprise is that truck drivers also stood in line at the truck’s introduction to have the LoneStar logo permanently tattooed to their arm (in some cases both arms) without yet owning or even having driven the vehicle. That’s a truck that was built to love! LoneStar is much more than a great truck. A functional truck designed to offer emotional opportunities like no other, LoneStar is also a means to re-invigorate and reposition Navistar’s entire brand.

FIGURE 1.1 Interior (birds-eye view from above) and exterior of innovative LoneStar long-haul truck by Navistar’s International Truck brand.

Obviously, most companies would want their products to rouse customers as successfully as LoneStar has. Rather than creating products that themselves captivate customers, many companies attempt to build interest through loyalty programs, catchy campaigns, or other add-on programs. Odd as it may seem, it is quite common to attempt to engage customers by doing anything but changing the product itself!

This is what Navistar used to do. Formerly, their strategy was to make functional, cost-effective products. Engineers made the product for its functions rather than to serve emotional needs; when trying to sell it, the sales group used emotional appeals, hoping to interest customers. Instead of competing for the top-loved brand, they competed for the lowest-margin commodity. This is the way many companies have long treated emotion, as something to evoke after the product is built in order to make the sale. This is a fundamentally different approach from meeting an emotion-based opportunity head-on.

Today Navistar makes its trucks both for functional purposes and to fulfill emotional ones. Driving a truck from Cleveland to Kansas City, a driver delivers the goods to the destination. Driving a LoneStar also allows the trucker to enjoy the pleasure of getting there. If the truck did not get the goods from Cleveland to Kansas City, nobody would be satisfied, no matter how exciting the truck is, not the trucker nor their client. The result would be negative emotions such as anger, loss, neglect, or incapability.

Meeting functional needs is a requirement to prevent negative emotions, but success goes far beyond preventing negative emotions. People love a product not only because it serves their task, but because it serves emotions related to their task as well. For the trucker, just getting from Cleveland to Kansas City is not enough. The trucker prefers to get there in a way that makes him or her feel proud, powerful, comfortable, professional, and successful. There is more to the experience than the functional task; the lifestyle benefits of the experience are important as well.

Navistar aggressively and consistently used an emotion strategy to drive development of LoneStar. Throughout Built to Love we revisit Navistar’s transformation from being commodity driven to emotion driven, uncovering customer-desired emotions and translating those into a product emotion strategy. In Chapter 7, we demonstrate how that strategy produced a series of exciting new trucks, including LoneStar, partly through a high-emotion, visual form language.

Navistar is one of many case studies explored in Built to Love. Not all companies understand that emotions cannot be an add-on, an afterthought, and still engage their customers. Emotions that powerfully engage customers are those that are core to the very reasons to make the product in the first place: because it will be a product that customers value. A product built to love.