Let’s look at some cold, hard, and fun facts.

A search on Instagram one morning in mid-September for #me, gave me over 123 million results. Just 18 hours later a further 466,000 had been added. Let’s round that up to half a million a day, which means 26,000 photos with the hashtag ‘me’ are uploaded to Instagram every hour.

It’s impossible now to create products and services without considering what your potential customer believes, or understanding what they value. And increasingly what they care about is how the choices they make, and the things they consume, buy, share, or relate to, say about them.

Yes, there are a heck of a lot of people who care that the chicken in their curry was happy before it died. And as Warby Parker Co-Founder Neil Blumenthal found out, when he worked for a charity that provided glasses to people in developing countries, “you could be the poorest person on the planet and you’d rather be blind than wear a donated pair of 1970’s cat eyes”.

People are telling us what they care about and it isn’t our products, it’s their journey, their story and the meaning they can create in their lives.

It turns out that the key to creating something great, is to make something that changes how people feel and makes them fall just a little more in love, not with what we sell, but with themselves.

Image by Jodi Bart.