Marcus Buckingham's argument in his recent Harvard Business Review piece is worth taking seriously, and not just for the framework it proposes. The piece is interesting because of what it reveals about where most brands and leadership strategies go wrong before it even starts: it focuses on what is broken rather than on what is working at its most extreme.

The insight is precise. Buckingham's research, drawing on longitudinal data from Gallup covering more than 1.8 million employees and tens of millions of customers, shows that the relationship between experience quality and performance outcomes is not linear. It is curvilinear: the meaningful bump in loyalty, productivity, and advocacy appears only when experiences are extremely positive, not when they move from poor to adequate, but when they cross from good to genuinely loved (Buckingham, Design Love In, HBR Press, 2026).

This has obvious implications for how brands collect and use insights. Most brand research is organized around dissatisfaction: what are people complaining about, where is the friction, what needs to be fixed. The implicit assumption is that reducing negative experiences produces loyalty. But if the relationship is curvilinear, then incremental improvements under a certain threshold produce minimal results. The data from someone who rates their experience a 4 out of 5 tells you almost nothing useful about what produces a 5.

The people who already love you are a data source most brands ignore

The customers and employees who have crossed that threshold are not just commercially valuable because they spend more, churn less, and advocate more actively, though they do all of those things. They are epistemically valuable: they have already crossed the friction, survived the pain points, and arrived somewhere else. They know what got them there.

Research from Medallia and Ipsos, spanning 800 CX practitioners, consistently shows that the experience elements driving genuine loyalty are not the ones brands typically invest most heavily in. Friendly employees, feeling genuinely known, and moments of surprising care outrank personalized offers, social media engagement, and loyalty program mechanics. The brands that understand this do not just ask their most loyal customers what they want next. They ask them what made them feel, at some specific moment, that this brand understood something about them that most brands miss.

That is a different question, and it produces a different quality of answer.

Significance and the deeper mechanism

Buckingham identifies five conditions for extremely positive experiences: control, harmony, significance, warmth, and growth. Of these, significance is the most interesting and the most frequently misunderstood. He defines it as the feeling that one's own preferences, talents, histories, and quirks matter. That the brand knows your story and cares about it.

This is close to something I have been developing in my own research on brand belonging, but it does not go quite far enough. Significance, as Buckingham frames it, is something a brand delivers to a person: the brand sees you, therefore you feel appreciated. But in the cases that produce the deepest loyalty, the mechanism runs differently. The brand does not create the feeling. It names something that was already there.

The brands that generate genuine belonging are not the ones that make their customers feel significant through clever personalization or emotionally intelligent touchpoints. They are the ones that arrived at a tension the community was already carrying, often in silence, and gave it language. Glossier did not invent the frustration with aspirational beauty standards; it named it and built a product and visual language around that naming. Patagonia did not create environmentalism; it found people for whom environmental responsibility was already an identity, and became their mirror. Dove's Real Beauty campaign worked not because it made women feel seen by a brand, but because it named a wound that already existed and that no one in the category had acknowledged.

This distinction matters for how brands approach the insight work Buckingham recommends. Asking your most loyal customers, "What made you feel significant here?" will produce useful data. But the more generative question is: "What did we name for you that you had not been able to name for yourself?" The answer to that question reveals not just what to replicate in the customer journey, but what the brand is actually for.

The employee dimension

Buckingham extends this logic to employees as well as customers, and the parallel is not incidental. The Kroger cases he describes, cleaning ambassadors, certified cheesemongers, associates whose names appear on the packages they prepared, are all versions of the same mechanism: people whose specific competence and identity were named and made visible, rather than averaged into a generic role.

The Medallia research shows that employee experience and customer experience are not separate problems with separate solutions. Brands that invest in making employees feel genuinely known produce customer experiences that feel genuinely human, because they are. The warmth that a customer experiences at a Kroger counter is not manufactured; it is the overflow of an employee who feels that their particular way of doing their work matters to the organization.

This is also where the B2B objection dissolves. The argument is sometimes made that loyalty and love are consumer categories and that in B2B, the relationship is rational and transactional. But B2B purchasing decisions are made by people. The trust that makes a client renew a contract, recommend a supplier, or defend a partner in an internal meeting is the same trust that makes a customer return to a grocery store. The element that produces it, feeling genuinely known and genuinely served by someone who cares about the specific texture of your situation, is not category-specific. It is human.

What this requires in practice

The practical implication of Buckingham's framework, and of the extended argument here, is that the most valuable insight work a brand can do is not research into what its average customer wants. It is deep qualitative work with the people who have already crossed the threshold into genuine love, mapping not just what they value but what the brand is named for them that no one else has.

That work is harder to commission, harder to synthesize into a slide deck, and harder to turn into a KPI. It does not produce the clean, quantifiable outputs that loyalty program mechanics produce. But it produces something more durable: a precise understanding of the tension the brand resolves, the identity it mirrors, and the community it belongs to before it belongs to anyone else.

Loyalty is not a strategy. It is a consequence of being, genuinely and consistently, what you say you are. The brands that understand this are not trying to manufacture love. They are trying to deserve it.

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Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/women-standing-face-to-face-with-colored-shapes-covering-them-7516553/

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References

• Buckingham, M. (2026). Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Harvard Business Review Press. Link
• Medallia / Ipsos. (2025). Beyond Transactions: The Shifting Dynamics of Customer Loyalty. Medallia. Link
• Deloitte. (2025). Reshaping Customer Loyalty Programs. Deloitte Insights. Link
• Anderson, E. W., & Mittal, V. (2000). Strengthening the Satisfaction-Profit Chain. Journal of Service Research. Link
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior. Psychological Inquiry. Link

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