# Designing for Love: The Ultimate Business Driver

**Podcast:** HBR IdeaCast
**Published:** 2026-04-14

## Transcript

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We need to delight our customers.
We want to create a habit.
We want to build a relationship.
You basically want people to love your product.
I get that, but it seems like a tall order for a lot of companies, right?
You know, it could work for food or fashion or technology, consumer products that people really get passionate about.
But how do other types of businesses inspire devotion or even as you say, love?
Well, look, it isn't easy necessarily, but it is attainable and it's definitely a helpful goal.
And there's steps you can take to generate these strong feelings from your customers and by the way from your employees as well.
That's the crux of our discussion this week with Marcus Buckingham, a researcher and author of the new book, Design Love In, How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business.
He also wrote the new HBR article, What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans.
Here's our conversation.
You know, every company wants to delight its customers.
Your article suggests that many, that most are going about this the wrong way.
So talk about that.
Well, if you look at extreme positive outcomes that companies want, they want customers to come back more, they want word of mouth, they want employees to be productive, they want loyalty and resilience from those employees.
And if you think about it, that's really what the job of a leader is.
You're just trying to change behavior.
Most companies go about it in a way that's simple and directive.
So you set goals for employees and then you give corrective feedback, or you set pricing or loyalty programs for customers and incent them to change their behavior, which works, but it works temporarily.
If you want to actually develop ongoing, sustainably productive behaviors from your customers or your employees, then you have to follow an equation back upstream.
And that equation is simply experiences of people drive their behaviors, which drive the outcomes.
So if you want extreme positive outcomes in terms of productivity or in terms of repeat visits and so forth, then you've got to design extreme positive experiences.
And experiences live inside the person, the customer, or the employee.
That's what then drives their behaviors sustainably.
And that's what drives their outcomes, which means companies need to be in the experience making business.
Experience design is the mechanics of behavior change.
And we don't think that way.
We design hospitals and schools and stores and restaurants and businesses in general around processes and systems, which isn't bad.
It's just not the actual way in which you get sustainable behavior change.
So the point of the article is we ought to be really interested in how do you design experiences that live inside the person that move them to act in sustainably productive ways.
Experience making is a capability that most organizations and many leaders don't really look at seriously or implement or operationalize.
So you say confidently that this is the way to you know better long-term sustainable business results.
What is the evidence that that's true?
Well, if you look meta-analytically at sentiment, so customer or employee sentiment, and you just look at the relationship between sentiment at time one as measured on a one-through-five scale, and then outcomes at time two, outcomes in the form of grades for students or patient outcomes for patients, or repeat visits for customers, productivity or loyalty for employees, the relationships are strongly causal.
So the more positive you are expressing your experiential feelings on the x-axis, the more productive the outcomes are on the y-axis.
So the first finding is that there is a causal relationship between experiential feelings and then subsequent outcomes.
And the median or the mediating variable in the middle is the behavior.
So that's the first finding, Ardi.
But the second one's more interesting.
We assume that relationship between experiences and outcomes, many of us, is linear.
So if you move a two experience to a three or a three to a four, you get the same level of outcomes increase.
So if you've got an awful lot of unhappy customers at a two, it behooves you to move them to a three.
Or you've got a lot of sort of averagely happy employees, it behooves you to move them from a three to a four.
But in fact, the data show that the relationship between experiences and outcomes isn't linear, it's curva linear, which means it's like a hockey stick.
And so moving a two experience to a three doesn't change behavior, it doesn't change outcomes.
When it comes to the measurement of experiences, you got fives, extreme positives, which do drive behavior.
And everything else is just not a five.
The world is far more binary than we think it is when it comes to experiences driving outcomes.
So basically you're saying you want to get that five.
And it's tricky because you know, I feel like you know, Uber and Lyft has ruined the meaning of the five-star experience.
You know, the five-star is is sort of you know the minimum that that is considered acceptable.
So I worry that we rate things a five when we actually mean a three or a four.
But let's take what you're saying for gospel that you want these five experiences.
I don't think anybody would argue about that, but isn't that like you know, writing a bestseller?
You know, it is hard to pull off even by design.
Yes.
Well, and and yeah, I think you're right.
I think there's been a lot of people that have ruined the fives, not just Uber and Lyft and so forth, but but you could argue every car dealership where they're calling you up afterwards and saying, by the way, I won't get I won't get my commission unless you give me a five.
There's something called Goodhart's law, named after an economist from the London Business School that basically said when you turn a metric into a target, it ceases to be a metric.
But if you can remove Goodhart's law and just look at the metric, that curve-linear relationship is very strong and reliable.
But to answer your question, yes, it is really hard to get to do something that is so compelling, so remarkable, so authentic and genuine, resonant, that it actually changes my behavior.
The first point of the article, indeed the book, was but hey, I'm sorry, as a leader, you're in the behavior prediction business, and fours don't do it.
Like take net promoter score.
We should just dump it because it lumps fours and nines with tens in that case, and then assumes you can subtract the sixes and belows, as though these are all the same unit of analysis.
They aren't.
So to begin with, as leaders, we ought to go, what actually predicts behavior?
It's the extreme positives in terms of sentiment.
We need to be super curious about that.
And then if we can reverse engineer that.
Everything else that we're doing, it's not going to get us the behaviors that we want.
Let's just all own up to that and then look really intelligently at well, what are extreme positive experiences and how do we design them?
I mean, yes, to your point, it doesn't make it easy to design them, but you won't do it ever if you're not actually focused on the right target, which in this case is how do you get somebody, customer or employee, to genuinely go, that's a five.
When you do that, when you really do focus groups and interviews and so forth with those people saying five, the word you bump into again and again and again spontaneously is people saying, I love that.
I love that restaurant, I love those shoes, I love that movie.
Hollywood's known this for the longest time that unless you have someone going five, then you can't predict whether or not they're gonna see the movie or tell anyone else to see the movie.
It's fives or nothing.
So that word love, uh, you know, as a repressed British researcher, I wish it weren't so.
The L word, yes.
Yeah, the L word.
That's the word people use.
I know I changed it to all sorts of words over the years: joy, passion, satisfaction.
But that's the word people use.
So, really, love isn't a coating.
We're not saying to leaders you should be nicer to people.
We're saying five equals love.
So if you get people to say, I love that, which is not easy, that's what drives behavior.
And so, what we're in a sense saying is love's the most powerful force in business, and we ought to be able to look at it intelligently if we're gonna design strategies for it.
At the moment, we're not doing that, which means sometimes we hit it and sometimes we don't.
I want to stay with extreme positives for a second.
So, you know, as you said, it's hard to design them, but they may be the key to building up long-term loyalty that really moves the needle.
How about some examples of companies that have identified extreme positives and recognized that and built on them?
The obvious one I think is the Walt Disney Company.
Do you argue with their strategy and the way that they're focusing on all the streaming wars and the rest of it?
But I mean, the person I profiled actually in the book of the article was Josh DeMaro, who lost the good call.
I know.
The new CEO.
I'd heard about this thing called the Josh Effect, and he at the time was running the parks, resorts, consumer products, and imaginary in the cruise ships, which he had renamed Disney Experiences, which I think is interesting.
And I got to follow him around a whole bunch.
And I mean, he's drunk the Kool-Aid, or maybe he always had it in him.
But he's taken experience design incredibly seriously.
And everything that he does, I think, is all about whether it's him as a leader, deliberately going, he's got a custom where he goes furthest from the stage, closest to the guest in any room that he's in.
Obviously, they want to shove him on stage all the time.
But he leaps off the stage furthest from the stage, closest to the guest.
That's where you go.
That's where you go talk to the cast members.
That's where you spend your time.
That's for them.
For the guest, it's for him, I think it's not what would Mickey do, it's what would Walt do.
And he tells a story of when he first was president of Disneyland, everyone was being presented an imagineering idea that they would fire Spider-Man across the park every night.
And every one of the other Disneyland presidents or Walt Disney World presidents from around the world said, no, that's a stupid idea.
We're not going to do that.
And in his brain, he was like, you know what?
What would Walt do?
Walt would do Walt would do crazy stuff.
Let's fire Spider-Man across the park every night and we'll pick up all the mess afterwards and we'll do it again the next night.
So his whole natural orientation is toward experience design in all of its many forms.
I spent about three hours with him as they were redesigning the Millennium Falcon ride.
And to see him, Ardy, at the level of detail going, because I was like, why are you redoing the ride?
Are you trying to get more throughput?
And he's like, no, we got two hour waits already.
I'm not going for a four-hour wait.
I'm like, well, why are you spending 40 million dollars on redoing the ride?
And he goes, because people get off.
We've got data that show that they like it.
It's a four, but it's not a five.
And in his telling of it, the Disney brand's super delicate.
If you don't get people going, I love it, they go off the ride and they go, Yeah, you know, fine.
Then the brand will break.
And so in his brain, anything I'm doing, he says, that that will help me build a little bit more love out of that ride.
And by the way, he was super in the weeds about how to tweak the ride, which to me fascinating.
Anything I'm doing to build more love in the brand is a really good use of my time.
Disney's done a really good job over the years of going, we're not universal, we're not six flags, we're not selling anything other than an experience.
So what if you're not Disney, right?
What if you're selling widgets?
What if you're selling parts that it actually is important to be cheaper?
You know, can you really aspire to these kind of extreme positives?
You know, if you're not in a glamour business or a very experiential business like Disney.
I mean, really, what you're trying to do is that as a leader of a company, you've got two basic questions you're trying to answer all the time.
You don't have 47 questions, you got two.
In some of the future value of the business, anyway.
Number one, do we have more customers loving our business tomorrow than today?
And number two, do we have more people loving working here tomorrow than today?
Not every single decision is going to drive those two questions, but those are the two questions your investors care about.
If you don't know the answer to those questions, and frankly, most companies don't, they measure it wrong.
But you're really trying to find out how much love is in the system.
And if you're thinking about that as a widget maker, you're thinking about that as a car dealership, you're thinking about that as a grocery store, those lead you to really interesting decisions about well, what are we doing to get more customers to fall in love with this?
That's an interesting question.
And so if you reverse engineer that, what do people mean when they say love?
Because we use it all the time, and it's confounding because we use it about a pair of socks or a movie or a mother or a mentor.
So if you're not careful as a business leader, you start going, well, that's just a careless exaggeration of the word like, they don't mean love.
But because it's a driver of behavior, it must mean something coherent around the world because it changes what people do.
And when you unpack that, what people seem to mean is that an experience people label loving when it's an experience that allows you to feel more fully yourself over time, flourishing by any other word.
Because if you think about it, we go through our world sort of wrapped up like an armadillo, and any experience we gives us a chance to take off one little plate of armor, just a little bit.
It could be like I love that outfit because when I wear it, I feel more fully myself.
It could be I love that mentor because she looked past my performance review and actually moved me into a role, even if I didn't want to, like it was tough love, but they moved me into a role where I could do this.
If you have any experience that lets you take off little one little plate of armor, the word we reach for to define that experience is love.
So if you're selling a widget and you can get customers to feel like you are interested in helping them through their experience with you, feel more fully themselves as they do business with you, which sounds odd, but is eminently doable.
That's the human mechanism for buying more stuff from you, for paying more margin from you, from advocating word of mouth for you.
How we do it, the activations you would use at Disney will be different than sort of Chick-fil-A, than Kroger, than Rivian.
But if you unpack any one of those companies as an example, Rivian's not selling cars.
They're selling, by the way, in a way, way more successfully, I think, than Tesla.
They're selling an experience that they're trying to enable some people to step into that experience and go, gosh, they know me, they care about me, they remove plates of armor from me, so I keep just leaning into that experience.
Many people have a knee-jerk skepticism of business.
They're cynical about what business does.
If business, you know, ratchets up the we love our community message, uh, even if it's sincere, a big group of the population is gonna think, oh, come on.
And I think your point is, and yet persevere.
I mean, how do you communicate a message that I love my employees?
I love, you know, the community, whatever it is, in a way that not only it is sincere, but is perceived as sincere.
I mean, the answer would be it depends on the kind of leader that you are.
I'm sure Josh Damaro is a different kind of leader than Patty Pop at uh P PG and E.
But I think there's two foundations that you're building off of here.
One is the data that we mentioned before.
Love isn't a soft coating of niceness, it's not kumbaya, and it's not flattened into kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower with chocolates.
Love is the precursor for productive human behavior.
The data is on this is unequivocal.
If you want sustainably productive human behavior, it doesn't happen in loveless environments.
The data on love is it's very powerful driver of good things.
But the other part of it is that I know this is gonna sound strange, Artie, but you can operationalize it.
If you take people who say, I love that toothpaste, or I love that car, or I love that, I love my PGE, or I love my Disney, and you reverse engineer it, you don't get nothing.
In fact, in the article, it breaks down into a sequence of five feelings that are sequential, which serve for any leader as a blueprint for experience design.
And it basically says if you can design activations that create these feelings sequentially, you will gradually be intentionally moving people, customers or employees, toward that lovely place where they're walking around with love in their heart for you.
Well, if we can break it down into a sequence of feelings, well, now you can design for it.
Now it becomes a methodology, which you could dismiss an eye roll, but boy, you look at the most sustainably successful companies, they have an eye-rolled.
Whether it's the apples of the world, or whether it's the Disneys of the Worlds, or whether it's prior to their sale, the Southwest Airlines of the world, you can see that there are a lot of companies that took it really seriously and did try to design it.
So these conditions, you know, harmony, warmth, growth, etc., they also are aspirational.
So, you know, how can a leader tell whether these are actually showing up in the lived experience of either their employees or their customers?
There are these five control, not control over others, control over self.
That's the first feeling of love.
If you create a world in which I feel powerless, I will lean out, I will keep my armor plating on.
So the first thing you're doing, you know, like Chick-fil-A going, we're closed on Sunday.
That's a very loving thing to do, even if you lean out.
There's a whole lot of people who go, I understand what that stands for, and I lean in.
That's clarity is loving.
Harmony is do you understand what I'm feeling and do you care?
And so you have you designed an experience which communicates to me wherever you might want to move me to, you've got to meet me before you can move me.
That's intentional.
Significance is basically, do you understand my story and do you care?
So that's that's uniqueness, and have you understood my story?
And can I anything about my experience change because of it?
Warmth of others sounds obvious, but it's actually who's with me and how can they help?
Humans hate being isolated in experience.
And the last one is growth.
Will this experience make me more capable in any way to face the world tomorrow?
So if you can design those in, then you are creating that experience of one plate of armor coming off after another until the person is walking around with love in their heart.
How do you know if you're doing it?
In the book, I've just had two very simple questions to measure each of those five.
So you could use those to figure out whether or not you've got love coursing through the veins of your experience or whether it's basically a bloodless, loveless experience.
But the other extreme, ID, if you and I would go start a business tomorrow, I would blow up the entire mystery shopper business and the entire employee survey business.
And I would say, look, the data is compelling, the world's binary.
It's either unloving or loving.
It's like a staples easy button.
And what we should do actually is just have a free app.
And every customer and employee should just have a button, loving, unloving.
And if you're a CEO and you really wanted to know, if you're a bank, you could do a lot worse than just have a binary, loved it, didn't love it, loved it, didn't love it.
I'm interested in your view of AI and to what extent it can help in these processes, to what extent it is a risk for companies to bring into their processes.
The way that I think about anything in a company that a leader does, the fundamental measuring stick is is this bringing more love into the system or is it driving love out?
AI, we need to think about in that way.
And there's two angles to it, which I don't hear talked about very much, but two really different angles to AI.
One, can I love it?
And of course, if love is really just me feeling more fully myself over time, if that's flourishing, can AI help me flourish?
Apps are flipping lootly.
Makes me smart, it's really good at patent recognition, it's really good at summarization, it's really good at some things that enable me to be smart quickly.
It's like I love it and I do love it.
The other side of that equation is can it love me?
Which really means if I put a whole bunch of AI systems in place that, say, for example, handle my customers, and the customers are on the receiving end of an AI experience.
Am I bringing more love into the equation or less?
Can I feel as a consumer that this AI experience is making me more likely to go, I love that.
And I think there we would have to say a couple of things.
One, AI is not, it does not empathize with the human experience.
It never can and it never will ever.
Forget AGI, it will never understand pain, fear, shame, embarrassment.
We know it won't.
We know that any presentation of that is simply a probabilistic word document that it came up with.
We know it will never experience those things that are human that we lean into that are part of the way in which a loving experience is fashioned.
So if we're not careful, love will be driven out by AI solutions.
By the way, it's sort of interesting that we talk about jobs as a whole bunch of tasks, like agentic or identic AI.
It's like, guys, you're completely missing the point about jobs done excellently.
It's not a whole bunch of tasks.
What you're trying to do is create experiences for colleagues or for customers.
And when the experiences are extreme positive, we lean in and we have behavior change.
AI is not good at that.
AI is not good at that, whether it's a housekeeper in a hotel, or whether it's a coder, or whether it's a lawyer.
AI's bad at experience making.
It's very good at repeatable, predictable tasks, although its reliability has problems and those compound when you start turning it into a gentic.
Putting that aside, it'll get better at that.
But it will always struggle to get humans to go, I love the experience it made for me.
It won't fail.
It'll just be a three on a scale of one to five.
And I don't really hear anybody talking about that angle.
I mean, obviously, many companies are laying people off because of AI, but probably they're using AI as the excuse for that.
For us to really be going, how do we use AI most valuably?
And this is going to sound really weird, Artie, but we have to engage AI with that word love.
If we genuinely believe loving experiences drive human behavior, which again we could argue about, but the data is pretty strong, then how does AI help us get more of it?
So if somebody listening to this embraces your thesis, what should they stop doing immediately?
What should they start doing immediately?
Well, the first thing is stop designing this is gonna sound strange, but stop designing for process or system.
Design for a whole human moving through an experience.
Healthcare.
If you are a patient, we spend a ton of money in the US on healthcare, and our outcomes aren't nearly what they should be.
All sorts of reasons why, but one of them is because we've designed a bunch of siloed systems and processes for the patient to go through.
And the poor patient is the one as they get handed off from one healthcare professional to another, to another, to another.
The poor patient is the one that's got to hold the unity of their experience and the narrative of that experience together.
We've designed, many of us, experiences that are disintegrated.
And we put all the pressure and the stress on the patient or the airline passenger or the consumer of the bank to put it all together and hold it all together.
So the first thing a leader should do is go, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm designing for experiences.
That means that this particular experience is, first of all, an experience.
There's a before, there's a during, there's an after.
I better go with that person on the journey from before the during and the after.
When I got to the end of my Audi lease, I had an Audi A4, love Audi.
I got to the end of it.
My experience, which is by the way, a completely repeatable experience, it must happen all the time at the end of leases.
If Audi was thinking about designing that experience as an experience, Audi, they would go, what's Marcus and every other leaseholder feeling at the end of that lease?
In my case, like most people, I was feeling excited to look at new models.
Wow, new cars.
Way, amazing.
Three weeks before the end of the lease, I got a robocall from another department of Audi, not the sales department, a different department, going, Robocall, you have failed to schedule a termination inspection.
And I don't know what a termination expression is, but I'd already failed it.
So I leaned out a week later, same call, a week later, same call.
How did that happen?
Well, that happened because Audi hasn't designed for an experience.
They haven't taken a person all the way through the experience and imagined how do you meet an a leaseholder right where they're at, right when they're about to be in this critical moment when they could choose another car.
Let's manage to that experience.
They're a very smart company, and I love the cars.
They've lost me for five years.
All because the leaders of the company hadn't designed for an experience.
Now, I'm me, you might love termination inspections.
I don't know.
Exactly.
But the first thing I think a leader could do is go, wait a minute, what is the before, the during and after?
Take onboarding.
Onboarding is a process, or we think about it as a process for our people.
It isn't a process, it's an experience.
There's a before.
Who sends the email out before?
Well, actually, we sort of disintegrated HR.
So the people that are doing recruiting are not the people who are doing the onboarding.
But the person who's moving through that is just one whole human.
And we've designed it really badly.
We've designed it rather in a way that's experientially unintelligent.
We haven't thought about the human before, during and after and moving them in.
I thought, frankly, Audi, that the people who would push back most would be people who didn't like the word love.
They actually haven't that much.
They've pushed back on the word experience.
The people don't seem to grok the idea that humans change their behavior based upon designed experiences, and that undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes.
So if leaders just started to just go, all right, let's move through with the person from the beginning through the middle to the end of an experience, you'll bump into, I call them smoking minis.
Because if you go on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, you'll see an image of this mini mouse character with her head off and she's smoking, and then she hitches up her skirt, and it turns out it's not a woman anyway, it's a man with a mini mouse hat on.
That was actually a fake mini in Vegas.
It wasn't a real Disney mini.
But we laugh at it because it's so jarring.
Can you imagine that character hugging your kid?
You're like, ah, gross.
But most companies, like that Audi termination inspection robo call, that's a smoking mini.
Go look at health insurers' emails to people who are denying or getting coverage, smoking minis.
Go look at how a bank tries to onboard an open new account, smoking mini.
Look at the way that a bank alerts you to fraud or credit card company, smoking mini.
There's smoking minis everywhere, because we just haven't taken experience design seriously.
And so we don't get the behavior change that we want.
All right, Marcus, final question.
If I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, I would like people genuinely to love my company, to love what we're doing.
I love my company.
I want other people to feel that, to experience that, to have that response.
What are a couple of things that somebody could do?
Well, I think for you, for your people, we've talked about this mechanism before, but if you think about control and harmony as significance as the doorway into getting people to love working on your team, probably still the simplest way for you to create those feelings in people is to do something like a weekly check-in with each of them, where you're asking, what how did last week really feel to you?
And then what are you working on this week?
How can I help?
That little sequence probably does a good job of hitting control, harmony, and significance.
What decisions am I going to help you make this week?
How are you feeling last week?
You do that 52 times a year with each individual on your team.
I'm not saying that's the one pill that will do it, but it's a great ongoing mechanism to allow people to feel control, harmony, significance in the work that you're doing with them.
And then for customers, the most unloving thing you can do, and therefore the most loving thing you can do on the flip side, shape shifting is unloving.
Saying clearly and definitively who you are as a company and who you are for people is the most loving thing that you can do as a leader in a company.
Who are you for people?
And so when, say United Airlines decides to change their whole frequent flyer thing so that it's now based upon whether or not you have the united card and whether you spend money on the credit card versus fly on the airline.
United is shifting who they are for people.
We used to think that United was an airline and we were passengers, and the part of their commitment to us was well, help you fly.
Now it's like, I don't know whether you fly or not.
We're a bank now.
Okay, whatever else that is, and it might make some short-term financial sense.
I don't know.
I haven't seen the numbers.
Whatever else it does, it makes us not love United.
It breaks the love that we might have had of United, because now we don't know who you are for us.
So the more vivid, the more precise, the more clear you can be about who you are for the customers you're serving, the more likely we'll be to start leaning in and start taking off some of that armor plating.
You know, the vicissitudes of life that we get hit with this in our world, we're looking for real.
We are looking for real.
And when a company can say, we are really this for you, that's not the only thing you should do, but it's a beautiful first thing that you can start to do for the customers you're trying to serve.
So, Marcus, thank you very much for being our guest on the HBR Idea Cast.
Well, thank you, Audi, as ever.
That was Marcus Buckingham, author of the HBR article, What Companies Can Learn From Their Biggest Fans, and is the author of the new book, Design Love In How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business.
Next week, Allison looks at new ways to build a top performing team.
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