What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans

Idea in Brief The Problem Despite decades of effort by organizations to boost engagement and loyalty, employee trust and customer commitment continue to decline. Many of those efforts try to fix deficient experiences or incrementally improve mediocre ones. But people don’t change their behavior as a result of mildly positive interactions. The Solution Research shows that behavior changes only when experiences are extremely positive—when people say they “love” them. Companies must figure out what pulls people to the very top of the positive-feeling meter and then design for that deliberately and at scale. How to Apply It Leaders need to create experiences that meet five conditions in sequence: control, harmony, significance, warmth, and growth. The goal of any corporate leader is to effect behavioral change: to move people to achieve certain outcomes. For employees, those outcomes might include high engagement and performance; for customers, purchasing decisions; and for both, loyalty and advocacy (being willing to recommend working for or doing business with the organization). By those standards, leaders today are struggling. Although business leaders have focused for decades on engagement and loyalty and, more recently, on employee (and customer) experience, employee trust levels are at all-time lows and engagement levels are at the bottom of a 20-year range. At the same time, customers are more demanding and more fickle. They expect immediate fulfillment, effortless returns, and products tailored precisely to them—and they will walk away quickly if those expectations aren’t met. Perhaps not coincidentally, companies (in which our confidence has collapsed) have lately made an abrupt about-face. They’re now doubling down on transaction and extraction. Employees, reduced to “head count,” are treated as dispensable, even as work reaches far more deeply into personal lives than ever before, as workplaces monitor employees’ opinions on social media, and communications technologies keep workers tethered to work at all hours. Meanwhile, customers are “eyeballs” or “average basket size.” And although consumers can summon almost anything with the tap of a screen, meaningfully personalized products feel vanishingly rare. Increasingly, whether as employees or consumers, our interactions with companies are stripped of humanity; where once we found human connection we now get ensnared in process, policy, and technology, including AI. At this time of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, everything is abundant, but nothing has our back. Thus, it’s hardly a surprise that the people whose loyalty we seek feel increasingly alienated and unmoored. Faced with this landscape, what can leaders do to generate sustainable high performance, loyalty, and resilience from their people and genuine commitment from their customers? And what critical capability must leaders develop to stop the drift and instead lift their teams and their customers up into a world that’s more productive for all? Most leaders, I believe, are looking for answers in the wrong place. There’s a deeply held management belief that the key to growth is fixing what’s broken. But for more than 25 years my research has found that the opposite is true: Focusing on improving deficiencies produces compliance at best—and disengagement at worst. In reality, people and organizations grow by building on their strengths. When leaders confront today’s decline in engagement and loyalty—from both employees and customers—many revert to that misguided belief. They look for what’s wrong and try to correct it. Witness the many companies that address complaints about long customer-service wait times by building an AI-enabled chatbot to contain and channel customers’ inquiries. Or they look to what people merely like as their guide—forgetting that mild approval is rarely enough to change someone’s behavior. No one returns to a restaurant because the experience was “fine.” Some leaders try to change behavior directly—by setting goals, giving feedback, lowering prices, or offering incentives. But people don’t rethink their identity or deepen their efforts or loyalty over the long term simply because they were told to. Marketing research consistently shows that incentives and loyalty perks produce short-term transaction spikes but no increase in lifetime customer value. And my own research using data from ADP’s human-capital-management software reveals that, on average, fewer than 4% of employees ever go back to look at, let alone be motivated by, their goals during the course of a year. To truly move people toward positive outcomes, leaders must pay attention to what I call “extreme positive experiences”—which make employees speak with genuine passion about their work and customers not just prefer but love a product or service—and then operationalize what’s working in those experiences. In this article I’ll draw from my work with both product and service companies and from a wide array of research to explain how we know extreme positive experiences change behavior, why the word “love” shouldn’t be a taboo for businesses, and, ultimately, how leaders can create experiences that stir extremely positive emotions in their employees and customers alike. The Power of Extreme Positives Decades of research show that extreme positive experiences are very different from mediocre ones. That’s why you can’t achieve them by fixing what’s broken. You must figure out what’s already pulling a small number of people to the very top of the positive-feeling meter—and then design for that deliberately and at scale. Extreme positives are different. Think about this visually, as a graph: Plot the positivity of an employee’s experience on the x-axis and that same person’s productivity on the y-axis. Leaders who embrace the idea that employees’ experiences correlate to their productivity (which was proved by years of research I did with my colleagues at Gallup as well as work by others) might imagine a gentle, straight line upward that implies that a small increase in satisfaction among employees will track with a small increase in productivity. This belief—and its corollary, that reducing dissatisfaction by some margin for customers will lift loyalty and thus sales by the same margin—underpins many common business investment decisions. For example, organizations fund large efforts to “raise overall engagement” or “lift the middle performers.” They conduct training designed to bring capabilities of average managers up a notch. They work to reduce friction in the customer journey, believing that each incremental improvement produces a corresponding improvement in outcomes. But when you dig into real data—across industries, continents, cultures, demographics, and contexts—you find that the relationship between experiences and behavior is not a straight line. It is curvilinear: There’s a big hockey stick curve, showing that the real bump in performance outcomes appears only when experiences are extremely positive. That is the case, for example, in longitudinal data collected at Gallup from 2008 to 2015. Its HumanSigma meta-analysis of data on more than 1.8 million employees and tens of millions of customers and found that (1) outcomes improve significantly only after both employee and customer experiences cross critical thresholds; and (2) incremental improvements below those thresholds produce minimal results. In fact, researchers studying satisfaction and loyalty have found that this curvilinear relationship holds across a number of domains. (See the exhibit “The Relationship of Experiences to Outcomes.”) For example, Eugene Anderson and Vikas Mittal determined that customer satisfaction by itself is a weak predictor of retention and profitability until it reaches very high levels. Similar nonlinear data patterns have been found in the links between investor sentiment and stock returns, software developer happiness and the quality of the code produced, patient experiences and their health outcomes, and even between students’ engagement and their academic performance. See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals It seems that people—whether employees, customers, patients, or students—become more productive and loyal, buy more things, get healthier, and learn more as they report more positive experiences—but only meaningfully so when those experiences are extremely positive. Someone who gives a 5 out of 5 rating to something has an altogether different experience of that thing than someone who rates it a 4 does. (That’s why leaders should never combine 4 and 5 ratings into a single “percent favorable” bucket when trying to understand what experiences to design for employees or customers; it’s also why the Net Promoter Score, which combines the top two scores on the scale, is a problematic metric.) Getting to extreme positives. So how do we actually create 5 out of 5s—those extraordinarily positive experiences that generate real results? Imagine a trip to the grocery store. If you go and find its shelves well stocked with affordable items, you might give it a 4—it’s fine, but you aren’t going to tell anyone about the store when you get home. Even an extremely well stocked shelf won’t generate a 5. But what if an associate takes the time to show you how to test the freshness of a lettuce head by making it “squeak with a squeeze”? That creates a different quality of feeling in you. It might get you to say 5. To build extreme positive experiences, leaders first need to understand the feeling you had when that sales associate taught you about lettuce. Then they must figure out what made you feel that way and operationalize it. To continue with the grocery example, let’s look at Kroger’s Cincinnati-Dayton division. When one of its largest competitors, Publix, entered the Cincinnati market, division president Ann Reed (and, eventually her successor, Jake Cannon) didn’t respond by focusing only on correcting deficiencies. They asked me to work with them on a different question: What made customers love their Kroger? Instead of starting with what was broken, they spoke to the customers who already felt a strong attachment to their company, with the goal of uncovering the source of that love and devising new ways of building on it. Bob Willoughby, celebrated for his Hollywood film stills and influential jazz photography, captured rhythm-and-blues saxophonist Big Jay McNeely at Los Angeles’s Grand Olympic Auditorium in 1951. Bob Willoughby/Getty Images The most loyal customers, they discovered, all talked about having a human connection in the store—someone who took a little extra time with them or offered to help them find a particular item, an employee whose name they knew—and whom they could ask for in an increasingly impersonal world. Building from the insight that customers valued the feeling of being helped proactively, Kroger’s leaders decided that all customer-facing employees would carry groceries to shoppers’ cars. They taught associates how to offer the carry-out service and how to load groceries safely, and they tracked how often customers accepted the offer. Cannon conducted a similar fact-finding exercise with employees. In conversations with his most-engaged associates about their work experience, he heard that some of his people genuinely loved cleaning. So he shifted it from a low-priority task and created a role that protected that work: cleaning ambassadors, two per store. Their sole responsibility was cleanliness. They could focus on the work they felt extremely positive about with minimal interruption, and they were given distinctive jackets that indicated their role. That was one of several initiatives Kroger undertook to improve the employee and customer experience on the basis of what people responded to most positively. Other examples include equipping associates with uniforms that made their roles more clear and replacing gray carts with proud Kroger-blue ones. The changes produced immediate and significant performance gains. In the months following their introduction, team engagement scores increased seven points, and associate turnover dropped by 10.9%. Customers’ ratings of store cleanliness increased by 28.9 points, and their ratings of associate friendliness in the stores jumped 45 points, leading to a 4.5% increase in overall customer satisfaction. Cumulatively, the initiatives led to real-world changes in customer behavior and buying patterns. Kroger had made projections of losses of both revenue and foot traffic when a slew of brand-new Publix stores opened in its communities. But improved performance at Kroger stores in the Cincinnati market had such an impact that executives cut those loss projections by 62% and actually saw a 5% increase in sales in some stores. How the Best Experiences Make Us Feel If we’re going to create extreme positive experiences, we need to look at the way people talk about them and what that tells us. I’ve spent the past three decades studying patterns that might explain employees’ and customers’ extremely positive feelings. Qualitative research using interviews and focus groups yielded some valuable insights, such as the power of focusing on a person’s strengths. But I missed something critical: I had heard the same word again and again from the top-performing teams, the most loyal customers, and the most effective leaders, and yet I didn’t believe it. Or rather, I reflexively tried to change it, to make it more “business-y.” Mea culpa, because the word they all used to describe their extreme positive experiences was “love.” Their reflections included unprompted, uncomplicated phrases like “I loved working on that team” (from a Hampton Inn front-desk clerk); “I love the challenge of ‘winning over’ each flight” (from an Alaska Airlines flight attendant); and “I love that the deli manager knows just how thin I want my meat sliced” (from a Kroger customer). Across industries, roles, and cultures, when people reference an extreme positive experience they want to repeat, advocate for, and hold on to, the word they use instinctively is “love.” It’s critical that business leaders recognize that people use the word love to convey what matters deeply to them—and what will make them change their behavior over the long term. Some leaders are already banking on how vital love is to their businesses’ long-term value and success. Consider a meeting I attended with 30 Disney employees—Imagineers; representatives from finance, HR, and operations; film folks—as they gathered to create a plan to redesign elements of the Millennium Falcon ride. Josh D’Amaro, then the chairman of Disney Experiences and now the company’s CEO, called the meeting to address data that suggested that guests who rode the Millennium Falcon liked it but didn’t love it. D’Amaro wasn’t looking to improve the ride to get more guests to queue up for it—it was already drawing a two-hour wait. Instead, he was courting guests’ love because of the long-term implications for the firm as a whole. “Disney is a delicate brand,” he explained to me. “It lives in the heart of each guest, and it can be broken. Anything we can do to restore or amplify people’s love in their hearts is where we should be spending time and money.” What’s behind love? Understanding why people instinctively reach for this word when describing extreme positive experiences can help us understand what makes them so powerful. People use it to describe their feelings about everything from their mother or a mentor to a movie or an outfit—or a job—so it’s tempting to read it as merely a careless exaggeration of the word “like.” But when I looked more closely at the data, I saw that people consistently used it when an experience gave them the opportunity to feel more fully themselves. Here’s the take of the Hampton Inn desk clerk mentioned earlier: “I felt like we all had each other’s back—I could try new things and not worry that people would cut me down.” Here’s how the Alaska Airlines flight attendant describes her work: “I’ve always been naturally good at remembering names—the more full the flight is, the more I get to flex that talent. Time just flies by.” And here’s what the Kroger customer had to say: “Who doesn’t want to go back to a place where they know you, where you’re not just another customer in a line?” We tend to go through life wearing a kind of protective armor, though we know we have something unique inside us. Whenever we encounter an experience that allows us to put that armor down, we want to lean in to that feeling. It could be a small thing, like wearing something that feels unmistakably us or being helped by a store employee. Or it could be larger, like being seen and trusted by a leader or known and loved by a family member. The effect is the same. Over the years different researchers have landed on different constructs to describe this phenomenon: Edward Deci labeled it self-determination, pointing to humans’ craving for autonomy; William Swann called it self-verification, pointing to our deep need to be known accurately; and Martin Seligman landed on flourishing, which he defined as “the state of high well-being.” It all points to the idea that getting the opportunity to be ourselves is an extreme positive experience that makes us say, “I love this!” That’s what leads us to behave differently—the desire to get that feeling again. How Sun Bum Designed Love into Sunscreen I often hear that designing experiences applies to services, not products. But all businesses deliver experiences over time that determine what customers do next. Let’s look at how one company built love into a common consumer good: sunscreen. Sun Bum has become a beloved brand, especially among surfers and skaters (a group that has historically disliked sunscreen altogether). The company has more than six times the number of Instagram followers as the next competitor in its category (413,000 versus Hawaiian Tropic’s 66,000). Founded by Tom Rinks, Sun Bum became a category disruptor, unseating incumbents before being acquired by SC Johnson for nearly half a billion dollars. Rinks didn’t rely on clever advertising or incremental product improvements to grow the brand. From my own and others’ conversations with him, I’ve learned how he deliberately designed the experience of Sun Bum to create a specific set of feelings in customers that shaped what they did next. Here’s how he brought the five conditions of love to life. Control Rinks built Sun Bum around a single, clarifying insight: His four sons loved surfing and hated sunscreen—and they weren’t alone. He didn’t try to reach everyone with his product; he aimed Sun Bum squarely at that segment of potential users. To convey that Sun Bum was the sunscreen for them, he created a grumpy, minimalist persona, Sonny the gorilla. Control (continued) Sonny’s dark sunglasses and disaffected glare on the product’s packaging gave potential customers the cue they needed to make an informed choice about whether the product was right for them: If they too loved the surf but grimaced when slathering on sunscreen, Sonny’s demeanor resonated. If not, they moved on. Harmony Surfer culture values authenticity, and the moment surfers feel marketed to, they recoil. So Tom didn’t persuade or preach. Instead, he signaled understanding. He borrowed a visual icon deeply embedded in surf culture: the surfer woodie, the wood‑paneled station wagon with boards strapped on top. He echoed that textured, sun‑worn aesthetic in Sun Bum’s packaging, a visual cue that made surfers feel instantly recognized. Significance Rinks invited customers to send photos of themselves doing whatever felt uniquely “beach” to them while using any Sun Bum product. He called it Show Us Your Bum. Irreverent and playful, the campaign placed customers at the center of their own experience and made them feel seen. Thousands responded. Warmth Rinks embraced the entire community around the product, especially the small, family‑owned surf shops that formed the heart of surf culture. When Sun Bum launched, in 2010, those specialty shops were struggling. They were selling the same mass‑market sunscreens found at gas stations and drugstores. Rinks offered them a product made specifically for them, one they could sell without competing on price with Walmart or Target. In doing so, he sent a clear message: “You’re not alone. We’re in this together.” That loyalty flowed both ways. Growth Because Rinks had already established loyalty and trust, customers were open to being challenged in a small but meaningful way. Sun Bum did that by widening the frame. Its ads, billboards, and aerial beach banners carried a single message: “We don’t care if you use ours. Just use sunscreen.” It was a call to responsibility. Sun Bum invited people to see themselves as part of something larger than a product: a shared commitment to taking care of themselves and one another. That call to action deepened attachment and helped turn a sunscreen into a movement. When we encounter a Kroger associate offering to carry our groceries to our car, we shed a piece of our daily armor; we feel more fully ourselves because we feel that we matter. “Wow,” we say, “I love that they did that for me.” And we come back to that store. Or when we put on a pair of shoes that makes us feel more like ourselves, we say “I love these shoes,” and we wear them often. And when we work for a leader who sees us and who genuinely wants us to reach our potential, we say “I love working for that leader,” and we gladly put in the extra effort. Remember the Millennium Falcon ride? The team at Disney figured out that on the three-person ride, only the pilot controlled the quality of the experience. The other two, the gunner and the engineer, played more passive roles and had fewer chances to affect the outcome of the adventure. The ride wasn’t getting the highest rating because two of the three riders were passengers, and they had less self-determination, less self-verification, less love. The ride redesign gives all three the power to choose the location of the adventure and the opportunity to learn how to manipulate the controls to evade attackers, retrieve cargo, and so on. Disney is betting that greater self-determination and more ways to shape the action will lead more riders to say, “I loved that!” (The new ride hasn’t opened at the time of this writing, so the jury is still out on whether it worked. But the precision of the team’s redesign aim is worth noting.) Designing Experiences People Love There will always be an ineffable quality to love, of course. But by synthesizing the research on what happens to make people feel more fully themselves—self-determination, self-verification, self-efficacy, flourishing, and all the rest—I’ve identified five conditions that give rise to extremely positive feelings. As a leader looking to change behavior, you must figure out how to create experiences that meet these conditions. I call the ability to do this “experience intelligence.” Not every “love that” experience requires all five conditions, but the experiences that do contain them all are most likely to move people to alter their behavior. And note, critically, that as with Maslow’s hierarchy, until the earlier psychological switches are flipped, the later ones cannot turn on. 1. Control. Research on perceived control and self-efficacy shows that without clarity and choice, people will not love an experience—even if the other four conditions are met. Many leaders miss this. They try to build connection or personalization without first answering the unspoken question that every person brings to a new experience: “What is this, and how should I engage with it?” Bob Willoughby/Getty Images Until that question is answered, people keep their protective armor on, making it difficult to penetrate their defenses and garner enthusiasm. To give them a sense of control, you must orient them quickly and clearly. That allows them to understand what this experience is and decide how to participate. At Kroger’s northern Kentucky stores, that orientation begins immediately. Timelines of each store’s history and murals of local sites grace the entrance. Inside, references to the store’s neighborhood tell associates and customers alike about the place they have entered. These visual touches tell shoppers and associates that they are entering a space that values community, allowing them to take off their armor and more fully engage with one another. 2. Harmony. According to research on psychological safety, people will not take interpersonal risks or challenge themselves unless they first feel emotionally secure. Experiences that people love meet them where they are before asking them to move somewhere else. Creating a feeling of harmony requires answering each person’s unspoken question,“Do you know what I am feeling, and do you care?” Kroger uses signage to introduce harmony. It stripped away jarring signs (such as “Last chance” over a shelf of marked-down items) that felt more like warnings than invitations. Instead, Kroger’s messages are funny and self-aware: “Oops, we baked too much” hangs over a shelf of excess muffins and cookies, and “Imperfect, but perfectly delicious” goes on a display of fresh but slightly misshapen fruit. These signs name what the customer might already be thinking, using an emotional tone that resonates rather than a bland, impersonal one. 3. Significance. Significance is the feeling that our own preferences, talents, histories, and quirks—our stories—matter. Research on personalization by Axel Honneth and on what Morris Rosenberg and B.C. McCullough first labeled “mattering” finds that people engage with experiences more deeply when they feel known. To design for significance you must address the question, “Do you know my story, and do you care?” Across departments, Kroger’s stores highlight the craft behind the food. At the meat, seafood, deli, and bakery counters, for instance, items are wrapped and finished with a sticker that reads “prepared for you by” followed by the name of the associate who selected, cut, or seasoned the order. Associates step out from behind the counter, hand packages directly to the customers, and thank them face-to-face. The exchange between the person who made the food and the person who will consume it underscores the significance of both of them. 4. Warmth. Humans perform best when they feel supported; not lonely. (Dare I say it? When they feel loved.) So to design love in, you must answer your employee’s or customer’s question: “Who is with me, and how can they help?” Cannon put “Kroger Experience Maker” on the backs of associates’ uniforms so that customers—who usually see shelf-stocking associates from behind—could instantly see that they would be looked after by the person setting out the produce. It signaled to customers who felt disoriented or alone that they could count on this person to help. Notably, designing warmth into an experience doesn’t require bold actions or extroverted associates; it can be as simple as showing customers that support is always available. 5. Growth. Finally, humans bond to experiences that make them bigger—more skilled, more elevated. When people feel more capable at the end of an experience than at the start, they remain connected to the people or organization that helped them get there. To create this condition, you must answer this question from your employees and customers: “How will I be more capable tomorrow than I am today?” (Again, sequencing is important: Researchers such as Richard Ryan and Edward Deci remind us that growth collapses when other fundamental conditions are unmet.) Kroger builds growth into its associates’ experience. For example, associates who show dedication to their area of expertise—say, cheese—are flown to New York to train for a week at Murray’s, one of the world’s most respected cheese shops. They return as certified cheesemongers, wearing a red apron and ceremonially cutting their first wheel of Parmesan. Kroger’s investment in deep skill-building turns jobs into vocations and, in turn, shows customers that they’re in the hands of employees who truly love what they do. A final note for leaders looking to create experiences that prompt behavioral change: Research from psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Carol Ryff (among others) finds that extremely positive feelings don’t arise from a single moment or interaction. They result from deliberately designed experiences that unfold over time, with touchpoints that allow the feelings to grow and ultimately change behavior. For example, Kroger’s customers didn’t experience one single jolting moment of pleasure. Instead, Kroger designed a sequence of touchpoints—groceries carried to the car, cleaning ambassadors, bright blue carts, new uniforms, new customer-experience training. Customers assembled these touchpoints into an experience they loved and then changed their behavior—by returning more frequently, spending more, and recommending stores more highly, as reflected in their sales figures. . . . Looking to what an employee or customer loves is not a distraction. Far from it, because love is the experience that most reliably creates change. Love, the quantitative and qualitative research record reveals, is the most powerful force in business, and experience intelligence is the leadership capability that businesses, and I believe society, need our leaders to cultivate, now more than ever. This article is adapted from Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), by Marcus Buckingham. Buy it here

What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans

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