Every firm wants to be the Apple of its industry, but despite an Apple flavoured design-emphasis being in vogue, very few companies are really applying it to everything a consumer sees and feels. Yves Béhar, in Fast Company this month, says that only 1% of companies are engaging full-throttle with design, and warns the rest are going to be “left in the dust by the companies that do. Over time, they will fail to connect to consumers in a relevant way and become obsolete.”

And there is data kicking around that backs this view: a three-year study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies by the research firm Peer Insight found that companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin from 2000 to 2005. Advocates like Yves are making the point that if companies really want to be design-driven, they really have to put a design in the driving seat. In his experience, most companies are either engineering-led or marketing-led, and “both of these are wrong”.

I was first inspired by Yves as the creative mind behind the $100 laptop, but googling him quickly throws up all sorts of great design work, ranging from Herman Millers leaf-shaped energy-efficient LED lamp, the reinvention of Birkenstock sandals, a chandelier for Swarovski and a line of lifestyle goods for Mini. And his definitions of design are certainly holistic:

The simplest definition of design is how you treat your customer. If you acknowledge their intelligence, and treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you’re probably doing good design.”

Yves is becoming a bit of a guru, having founded an award winning product and branding firm, Fuseproject, named ‘The Brand Wizard’ by Businessweek, and now a ‘Master of Design’ by Fast Company. So to pay my own respects, thought I’d give some attention to his top tips, or seven axioms even, for creating an amazing customer experience:

1. Design is how you treat your customers. If you treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you’re probably doing good design.
2. Design must be integrated throughout the organization. Design-driven businesses foster creativity and innovation at their core and reward factions typically at odds (marketing and operations or engineering) for working together.
3. Design is not a short-term fix. It’s a long-term engagement that requires you to think about how design affects everything that touches the consumer–from product to packaging to marketing to retail to the take-home experience.
4. You must be willing to fail at the design level, just as in marketing or operations.
5. Design must be driven from the top. CEOs in most industries today must have a true relationship with, and understanding of, the creative side of the business.
6. The solution to a problem will be different every time. Doing what your competitors are doing is not the answer. The connection to your customer has to be unique, not formulaic.
7. Never ask the consumer about the future. You can ask them what their aspirations are, but you will not get an answer about what you should do. Design will bring those stories to life