Made With Love: Why You Need To Design Love In, Not Bolt It On

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In 1982, Johnson and Johnson faced every company's worst nightmare. Seven people in the Chicago area died after taking cyanide laced Tylenol capsules. In a matter of hours, Tylenol went from the best selling pain reliever in America to being associated with death. Nobody would have blamed them for collapsing. But here's what's remarkable. Within weeks, Johnson and Johnson pulled 31 million bottles of Tylenol from store shelves at a cost of over $100 million before anyone even asked them to. They didn't wait for regulators, they didn't try to spin it. And then they did something that had never been done before.

Todd Henry [00:00:41]:

They invented the tamper proof seal and reintroduced the product in new triple sealed packaging. Within a year, Tylenol had recovered the most of its market share. Now, every business school teaches this as a crisis management case study, and it certainly is one. But I think sometimes we're teaching the wrong lesson. The real lesson isn't about what Johnson and Johnson did during the crisis. It's about what they had already built before it. You see, the reason that they could respond so boldly, pulling every bottle, eating the cost, leading with transparency, is because they had already built trust and love into the architecture of the company. Their famous credo, which was written nearly four decades earlier, put customers first and shareholders last.

Todd Henry [00:01:28]:

That wasn't a marketing slogan. It was the load bearing wall of the organization. So when crisis hit, the company didn't have to decide what to do. The decision had already been made years ago by the kind of company they'd chosen to be. And that's the difference between something that's bolted on and something that's built in. Bolted on values crack under pressure. Built in values are what hold you together when everything else is falling apart. Today on the show, I have two conversations about the forces that matter most in business, love and brand, and why both of them only work when they're designed into the foundation not being applied as a finishing coat.

Todd Henry [00:02:19]:

First, we're going to talk with Marcus Buckingham, whose new book Design Love in presents a data driven case for love as the most powerful driver of business results. And then I'll be joined by Lifang He, whose new book Brand Power Built in argues that the strongest brands aren't built by marketing departments. They're built into the product itself. Each conversation comes from a different discipline, but the same essential truth. You can bolt on what matters most. You have to build it in. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day.

Todd Henry [00:03:02]:

My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Marcus Buckingham [00:03:09]:

I'm a psychometrician by training, so I'm studying the relationship between experiences that people have as customers or as team members and then the outcomes that they drive.

Todd Henry [00:03:19]:

That's Marcus Buckingham. His latest book is called Design Love,

Marcus Buckingham [00:03:24]:

in which in the case of team members, is things like productivity or retention or advocating the place where you work to friends and family and for customers, it's the same thing. It's loyalty, it's repeat visits and so forth. So if you study extreme positive outcomes, whether it's team members or customers, you find that the word that people are using when they describe those extreme positive outcomes. And it's a word that I rejected, to be frank with you, Todd, for many years because it wasn't businessy enough. But if you do interviews and focus groups and ride alongs, and if you do primary qualitative research into when people have an extreme positive experience or they drive an extreme positive outcome, how do they talk about it? And the word that they instinctively use to talk about it is love. They'll say, I love that. I love working on that team. I love that leader.

Marcus Buckingham [00:04:10]:

I love that brand. I love those shoes. I love that movie. But when we are trying to reach for a word to capture an extreme positive outcome of ours, the word we humans use around the world, by the way, this is global. The word we use is love. And I kept changing it actually, Todd, to good words. Things like engagement, joy, passion, those are all fine. But that's not actually the word that we use.

Marcus Buckingham [00:04:34]:

The word we use is love. When we have an extreme positive experience, the word we use is love. And when you actually run the data on that, love turns out to be not just a careless exaggeration of the word. If you're measuring it on a scale of one to five, a five isn't just lots and lots of four. When you actually look at the relationship between experiences and outcomes, a 5 is categorically and behaviorally super different, 10 times more powerful in terms of driving behavior than a four. A four is more like a three. That's like a two. That's like a one.

Marcus Buckingham [00:05:07]:

When you get to fives, you get a really clear driver of what people are going to do next, how productive they're going to be, what they will share about their experience. And when you unpack the five, the word you bump into again and again is love. So the reason I say love is the most powerful force in business by far. And we can unpack what love means, but really, it's because love is predictive of behavior. Love, if I can hear you go, I love that I can predict what you're going to do next. If you say, I respected that leader or I learned a lot from that class, or I really enjoyed that hotel stay, all of those are positive. But I can predict nothing from what you're going to do next based upon those words. The only thing that is predictive of what you're going to go do next is whether you loved it.

Marcus Buckingham [00:05:54]:

And that's, in a sense, that was the impetus of the book to go, oh, my word. Love's the most powerful driver of anything productive that we humans do love. Love's predictive. Hey, dear executive, dear leader, in the business world, if you want to drive the most extreme positive outcomes for your business, it would behoove you to take that word love incredibly seriously. At least that's what the data show.

Todd Henry [00:06:19]:

I want to talk about that, the definition, how you define that. But I would love to first dive into a personal experience that you had you candidly share that you broke something beautiful when you sold your own company in 2017. What did that experience reveal to you?

Marcus Buckingham [00:06:36]:

When you build a business, you are so close to it as the founder. As you probably know, Todd, I'm a creative individual in the sense that I write books, I give speeches. I try to find patterns in data and tell stories about them. And when you're building a business, you're trying to get everybody to step into your story. And you talk about love a lot when you're building a business. Love for the people that you work with. They become like family. You're very close to them, they're close to you.

Marcus Buckingham [00:07:02]:

It's not soft. Like, love isn't like a coating of softness. Oh, be nice to people. It's a rich kind of connection between two humans trying to make something. And the same's true with your clients and customers. You get very close to them, and it's a very human endeavor to build a business. And I built it, and in 2017, I sold it to a large Fortune 500 company because they had 3,000 salespeople. And so my brain, I was like, a mission is so powerful.

Marcus Buckingham [00:07:30]:

Oh, my word. We need lots of smart friends to help us expand. The mission. Here's 3,000 salespeople. Off we go. And shame on me. But what happens when you do that? Isn't that some big company comes in and crushes love. It's that actually some big company comes in and has just a different set of agenda items Their shareholders, their quarterly reports, their ongoing performance management systems.

Marcus Buckingham [00:07:58]:

And what happened for us certainly was that love was killed by neglect. We just stopped talking about it anymore because there were so many other things on the radar screen. And I realized for me personally, Pablo Neruda has that wonderful line on love, that love is born in savoring, it lives in intelligence, and it dies from neglect. And what happened with my company is we just, we forgot about it and we basically talked about a whole load of other things, banal, practical, commonsensical sorts of things, but we stopped talking about love. And then in the end, your fluency in your own love language as a business dies. And in a sense, that was the impetus for me writing the book, was to go, no, we are going to pay as much focused, intelligent attention as we can on this thing called love because it's the most powerful driver of anything good. And if people like me as researchers can't focus on it, then we will allow what I see as the opposite of design, which is drift. We'll allow drift and the drift into lovelessness.

Todd Henry [00:09:12]:

I love the distinction between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and how a 5 is categorically different from a 4. You can be a very competent, well liked, well respected organization, but people don't love you, they don't love working with you. And that introduces an entirely different calculus when it comes to doing business with you. Right? It becomes an actual. The evaluative process is very different when it comes to versus it being a foregone conclusion. Of course we're going to work with you. I'd never heard that before, but really makes you think about not just again, the. The qualitative elements of designing love in, but actually the roi, the business return of that.

Todd Henry [00:09:54]:

I want to talk about your definition of love. You've deconstructed it into five distinct feelings. Control, harmony, significance, warm, growth. Why is the sequence of those feelings vital when designing an experience?

Marcus Buckingham [00:10:08]:

Just to back up one step, the overall definition, we flattened love right into Love island or to chocolates in front of the Eiffel Tower. But when the reason we reach for the word love, Todd, is that. And what's funny about that word, by the way, we use it for our mom and we use it for our socks. I love the socks. I love my mom and everything in between. And so initially, by the way, as a researcher, my first reaction was, we're using this randomly. But if you really unpack it, when we humans feel as though we have something unique inside of us and we want our life to be one in which we get a chance to express it. That's the human yearning.

Marcus Buckingham [00:10:44]:

And so if you think about what's the definition of love? I defined it in the book as a deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human, which basically means if you have an experience where you feel like you have a chance to express, to open up. Most of us go through life rolled up like an armadillo because we're protecting ourselves against the harshness of the world. And so anything that we can do, any little experience that we have that lets us open up just a little bit, even if it's our shoes. I love those shoes. Why do you love the shoes? Because when I wear them, I feel a little bit more like me. Why do you love your mom? Oh, because my mom is clearly all about helping me be more me. Why do you love that leader? That leader looked past my performance rating and into the meanness of me and let me express my. So if you think about flourishing as the feeling of becoming more fully yourself over time, that's what love is.

Marcus Buckingham [00:11:30]:

And whenever we bump into any experience, it could be going to the movies, it could be working for that mentor where we get a chance to feel more fully ourself over time. We call it love. That's the word. That's the verbal label we pick up. And so if a brand or a company or a leader wants to take love seriously, you start asking yourself, all right, how do you get people to feel a little bit less like an armadillo? How do you get them to open up just a little bit and then lean in and lean in? And that's where those five feelings came from. You do a review of the last 30 years of research into human flourishing, defined as, I just have the feeling of becoming more fully yourself over time. And you realize two things. One, you can't.

Marcus Buckingham [00:12:13]:

There's no shortcut to it, right? You can't fake it. You can't, like climbing Everest. You can't helicopter in at 23,000ft and rush to the summit. You've got to build it over time. And then you realize that there is a clear sequence to us getting to the place. And the visual image that I have is of that armadillo, where each one of the feelings of those five is like one piece of armor coming off as we lean in. The first is control, which is any experience I walk into. I've got to feel like I understand how it works.

Marcus Buckingham [00:12:47]:

What is this world? How does it work? Are there tools in it? And when I use the tools do they work for me? So some part of love is orientation, efficacy, agency. So not control over other people, control over self. The next feeling is harmony, which is every experience is first and foremost really an emotional experience. Our feelings are out and sensing it. And if we bump into an experience which is emotionally jarring, whether it's an email from a recruiter or whether it's a message from your boss, or whether it's as a customer, it's a robocall, as you're just finishing your car lease and they tell you failed to schedule your termination inspection or anything that's jarring for you, you lean out. So harmonies, when you meet an experience that meets you where you're at emotionally, you lean in. The third feeling is significance. It's that feeling of, I want my uniqueness.

Marcus Buckingham [00:13:44]:

At some point in this experience, I want my uniqueness to be understood. What's my story? Do you know my story and do you care? It's interesting, Todd. I don't want to start that way. I wanna start with control. Like control means tell me the rules. I like rules. I like some consistency and some predictability about the rules. But at some point in my journey toward love, I've got to feel as though you want to know me as a unique person and there might be some change in how this experience unfolds because of who I uniquely am.

Marcus Buckingham [00:14:14]:

Warmth of others is the fourth feeling. And at some point in your journey toward love, you look around and you ask yourself, who's with me? How can they help? Who's with me? How can they help? Humans, we don't do very well when we're isolated. Any loving experience has got to be one that at some point is shared with others. And then the fifth feeling is growth. So love is a forward facing emotion. At some point in your journey toward love in your heart for that experience, you start thinking about, will I be more capable tomorrow? Is there anything about this experience that helps me be a little bit more capable tomorrow? Anybody that we love, we never see them as finished, right? We, if we love anybody in our world, we see them always as a work in progress. And we know that tomorrow they're going to have to face the world again. And so love is always thinking about that sequence of five feelings.

Marcus Buckingham [00:15:03]:

Todd becomes like a blueprint for how would you, as a leader or as a person serving customers, or as a teacher or as a doctor, how would you design love in? Which really means how would you design an experience so that you are attentive to that sequence of five feelings which leads to of course, love isn't a coating, it's a set of ingredients. Which is why I ended up calling it the book Design it in. You can design it in. And that five feeling set is like. Is the roadmap, if you will, for how to do that.

Todd Henry [00:15:41]:

Let's talk about the story of someone who you describe in the book who has done this very well. You describe a senior Disney executive named Josh. You call it the Josh Effect. What is the Josh Effect and how can we learn from that experience?

Marcus Buckingham [00:15:54]:

It was funny because my work is always. Whenever I hear of anything at extreme excellence, my ears prick up and I go and interview the person that's doing it, whether it's my. The first role I ever studied was housekeepers, because there was some incredible housekeepers I'd heard about. And the last 25 years, I've probably spent all of those years doing some version of that, hearing about somebody doing something in excellence and then going and studying them. So I'd heard about this person called Josh d' Amaro in Disney. And this was about a year and a half ago now, as it turns out, just the other week, as probably he was just named the successor to Bob iger as the CEO of Disney. the time, when I was studying, though, he wasn't. He ran a big chunk of Disney.

Marcus Buckingham [00:16:37]:

He was running the theme parks and the resorts and the cruise ships, which he had renamed, interestingly enough, Disney experiences. But I had a chance to follow him around all over the place. And I guess the three things that stood out for me about Josh, one of them is he. There's a detail, a really clear understanding on his part that people need to be seen. And so we're walking from the back of house to the front on Main street and there's like a whole slew of cast members coming up to him. There's a cook who comes up and hugs him in a bear hug. There's somebody who just taps him on the shoulder. Remember, this is a very senior Disney executive.

Marcus Buckingham [00:17:18]:

Somebody taps him on the shoulder and goes, hey, it's my 40th anniversary today. Can I take a picture? Then there's a tour group, a bunch of guests who are on some behind the scenes tour group. He stops and has a 20 minute conversation with them and he's so excited to share with them what they're gonna see on their tour. And then you go into the main street of Disneyland and it's supposed to take. What I'm supposed to do is walk up the main street and see what he pays attention to and ask him about it. But we don't get 20 yards because he's overwhelmed with a mobbing scene of guests. And in my mind I'm thinking, how the heck do they even know who he is? But they mob him and they can see and he loves it, he's loving it. And he's seeing everybody talking to everybody.

Marcus Buckingham [00:17:56]:

And he's got this kind of unique ability. When you're talking to him, there's nobody else in the room. Like, it's a. Whether you're the lowliest quote unquote cook or whether you're a guest he's never met before, whether you're somebody else, he's his attention on you talk about a loving attention. It's like he sees the human. So there's that second thing that was just striking for me is I was in a room with 30 imagineers and operators and marketing people and so forth, all of whom were trying to redesign the Millennium Falcon ride. And Josh is in that meeting. And it's a two hour meeting.

Marcus Buckingham [00:18:30]:

And I'm thinking to myself, why are you in there? What are you doing in this meeting for two hours? You're redesigning a ride. But why you don't you have a bunch of people who do that? And he's. We decided to redo the ride, not because not enough people wanted to go on the ride. We've got a two hour wait for the ride. So it wasn't a throughput issue. It's the fact that we had heard and we have some data that suggested that when people got off the ride, they liked it, but they didn't love it. And Disney's a delicate brand. This is Josh talking and he's any time that I can spend to get people to go from like to love if I can, whether it's cast members or guests, whether it's a rider, it's a hotel, or it's a ship or whatever.

Marcus Buckingham [00:19:09]:

And I can, if I can help you go from love if I can really dive into the weeds of why are people getting off going love, why are they saying four, not five? That is a brilliant use of my time, says Josh. So for me, what was striking about that is design love isn't like this, but be nice to people. Like, it's not that. It's oh, no. The overall outcome. We're trying to get people to come off a ride in this case and go, I loved it. And if they aren't, I Josh, there's nothing more important than really unpacking. In this case, it turned out to be that there's three riders on the ride.

Marcus Buckingham [00:19:39]:

Two of them were more passengers than riders. If you got behind a pilot who's a 4 year old and you're the gunner or the engineer, then your experience as a gunner, as an engineer being piloted by a five year old isn't very good. So they had to rewire. Talk about control and harmony in terms of those first two feelings. His whole redesign, which he led by the way, was based on let's give people who are writing more control and then a real sense of emotional harmony to the experience they were going through. Which I won't bore you with the details of how they were doing that. But it was like this is a leader who fully understands that his job is an experience maker.

Todd Henry [00:20:17]:

Yeah.

Marcus Buckingham [00:20:17]:

And that's huge. All of it's genuine. That's the other thing is that this isn't fakery. He's not trying to manipulate people like he genuinely. You can tell his heart beats around the flourishing of another human. So if you as a leader don't give a whatever for the flourishing of another human, then you probably shouldn't read Design Love in because people are going to read it as fake. But he had it. He's got that as a genuine intention.

Todd Henry [00:20:47]:

I think that's an important point that you can't fake love. And you, you can't, you can't manipulate people into loving. Right. It's either genuine or it's not. And I think one more topic I would love to address with you because this is what's on everybody's mind right now is a lot of people fear that AI is going to make the workplace more transactional and less human. It's going to extract the love from our workplace. How can we use AI intentionally to design love in. To increase love rather than just maximizing efficiency?

Marcus Buckingham [00:21:18]:

I think when a lot of the people that are pushing the idea that AI is going to get rid of human jobs are the people whose jobs depend upon AI doing just that. You've invested trillions of dollars in AI, it better pay off. So they're not describing an analysis of a situation they're selling, which is okay. That's what they have to do objectively. When we analyze AI, what's interesting about AI is it's we can love it because it's brilliant at pattern recognition. It's agentic. It can do a series of things that are quite intelligent that we might otherwise have to do. So it can make us smart, it can make us efficient, so we can love it just like we can love a pair of shoes because this pair of shoes makes us feel more fully ourselves.

Marcus Buckingham [00:21:56]:

If we have an AI tool that helps us express more, better, smarter, faster, we can find ourselves going, I love AI, I love AI, so we can love it. The question I think that should be in everyone's mind is that can it love us? Can it love us? Can it bring more love into the system? And I think the jury's going to be way the heck out on that because yes, you could optimize AI for those five feelings. At the moment, nobody's designing AI for those five feelings, but you could design it to make people feel control, harmony, significance, warmth of others and growth. You could potentially do that. It's still challenging though, because AI doesn't understand the word flourishing. It never can and it never will. It can parse it, but it can't actually. We know that AI doesn't understand risk or fear or the danger of opening up yourself from your armadillo and risking expression creating and the shame that may come if you don't actually do it right.

Marcus Buckingham [00:22:55]:

And then when somebody actually risks with you the emotional connection that comes when a leader invests and believes it, like AI doesn't understand any of the thing that I'm just talking about here at all. And no question, we humans grow most in response to another human being, not another thing. With AGI, we don't grow best in response to another thing that pretends to be a human being. We grow most in response to another human being. Why? Because a human being does deeply understand flourishing, human flourishing because they are a human. So when we think about putting more AI into customer service experiences, replacing IVR interactive voice response with AI, AI or like having all performance reviews done by an AI, we just have to remember, are we bringing more love into the system or are we making that process, whatever it is, less loving?

Todd Henry [00:23:53]:

Design Love in is available now wherever books are sold. One thing that really stuck with me in that conversation is the idea that love dies for from neglect, not from some catastrophic failure, but from drift. You just stop paying attention and the thing that made your work or your brand or your team special quietly evaporates. Marcus made a data driven case for designing love into everyday experience. That sequence of control, harmony, significance, warmth and growth. And I think what's powerful about that framework is it gives you a diagnostic. It tells you where the experience breaks down when people go from I liked it to something less than love. Now we're going to turn toward talking about a more practical way that we often think about this interaction that we have with organizations.

Todd Henry [00:24:44]:

Li Fang. He comes at this from a different angle, but lands at a remarkably similar place. She spent nearly two decades leading brand strategy for companies like Apple, Amazon, and Ring. And her argument is that the strongest brands aren't built by marketing teams. They're built into the product itself, into every touch point of the consumer journey. Where Marcus talks about designing love in Lee Fong talks about building brand power in different vocabulary, but in some ways the same conviction. You cannot add the most important thing after the fact. It has to be there from the beginning.

Todd Henry [00:25:22]:

We'll be right back with that conversation in just a minute. Stick around.

Lifang He [00:25:30]:

Bre is one of the most misunderstood topics in the tech industry, and it is why I wanted to write this book. And I think people really don't have a shared understanding of what brand means.

Todd Henry [00:25:44]:

That's Li Fang Hua, author of Brand

Lifang He [00:25:46]:

Power Built in and puts you in tech. Oftentimes people see brand as something fluffy and a marketing activity. When they think about the word, it means logos, campaigns, stories, and. But when they think about product, it's, oh, wow. Like, product is something that really creates revenue and brand is not. And a lot of times people think product and brand as two separate things. So to me, brand and product are indispensable. And think about the best products you love the iPhone, Prime, Airbnb, the brand and product are the same.

Lifang He [00:26:27]:

So at its core, it really means that a company, a product, creates a deeper connection with customers and create that customer relationships through the product and everything around it. And I think the simplest way to think about brand is a stronger brand really means stronger customer relationships. So I think that can really help galvanize different groups of people who look at maybe a product, a business, differently. And because at the end of the day, the business's existence is to win customers through the products, through the services they launch. And that's really the intention of why I wanted to really help people broaden the understanding of what brand means and how it's changing from the past and where the opportunities are for leaders who are thinking about growth, creating new products and services, trying to really connect with customers and to build that stronger connection.

Todd Henry [00:27:30]:

I know the iPhone was a part of your journey, part of your experience. I was reading about the eventual development of the iPhone, the initial development of the iPhone, and many people don't realize there were years and years of. There was a lot of pressure on Apple to come out with a phone product because everyone else was developing one. And Steve Jobs and other leaders were saying, we're not going to do this. We're not just going to put something together because the technology doesn't yet exist to make something that will feel like an Apple product in people's hands, where the it will feel like it matches our brand. And it wasn't really until the idea of a touchscreen and multi gestures and all of that became feasible that he realized, okay, now is the moment. So is that an example of what you're talking about? How the interaction, the everyday interaction with the product itself reinforces the relationship or the brand relationship with the customer? Is that, would that be an example of what you're describing?

Lifang He [00:28:26]:

Yeah, Todd, that's exactly right. And I think that's a distinction between traditional consumer packaged goods and tech products. And if you think about a commodity like water, and the brand is the product, and if you think about liquid death, it's fairly a commodity, but liquid death really turned water into a really interesting idea and that appeals to customers. So for liquid death, the brand is the product. Tech products and services are slightly different. And I think tech products need to deliver more. It needs to deliver both functional features and performance. It needs to deliver that services to customers.

Lifang He [00:29:14]:

We also need to make customers feel something. So that kind of relationship cannot be formed through, you say, just packaging or brand identity alone or traditional advertising. And because the product is constantly available and you use it all the time and think about all the apps you use and the services, and it's really through that interaction that creates your perception of the product and the brand and the relationship with it. So that's a missed opportunity for a lot of people. That's where the biggest opportunities are. Like if you wanted to form stronger relationships, it's very important to start with the product, right? And there are so many areas to create that customer relationships. And of course, you need to extend beyond that and look at the end to end customer journey from the moment where people hear about it.

Todd Henry [00:30:13]:

You mentioned the concept of the journey as the product, which was something I certainly had heard that alluded to in the past, but I'd never heard of that as a core methodology or a core way of thinking about brand. Should we expand our definition of what we traditionally think of as product to include the entire customer journey from discovery to customer support, everything? How should we be thinking about that as leaders?

Lifang He [00:30:39]:

Yeah, great question, Todd. I think it's very strategic for leaders to look at the entire customer journey because I think the media landscape and the way people consume content have radically changed. Right. Maybe 20 years ago, people learned about something from TV and it was linear, but today people discover things from different places. And the brand is really shifting from mass advertising and TV driven kind of brand building tool to now. It really needs to look at the entire customer journey from customer acquisition to engagement to retention. Because again, to the point about what is brand, the purpose of building a strong brand is really to foster a deeper customer connections and cultivate customer relationships. And their relationships may change based on different company stages.

Lifang He [00:31:38]:

And I give you example, maybe a startup really needs to launch a new product and acquire new customers. And so the way to manifest a brand is around building that differentiation and value to really quickly attract customers like liquid death. And it entered a water market where it was very competitive. Their customers already had a lot of choices. But it turns out that people like that kind of fun branding options. But maybe a mature business like prime, it has 200 million customers, prime members globally. The way to maintain a stronger brand is really to reinforce the value to existing customers because the biggest driver is around program engagement and retention. So this is why I think there is no one way to look at it and each business is different and the way to invest, where to build a brand could vary based on the company stage and the products and the strength of the customer relationships.

Todd Henry [00:32:50]:

Brand power built in is available now wherever books are sold. I hope you can hear the thread running through both of today's conversations. Marcus Buckingham told us that love is predictive, that when somebody says I love this, you can predict what they'll do next. And that getting to that point requires intentional design, a careful sequence of feelings that lets people lower their armor and lean in. And Lee Fong told us that the strongest brands are the ones where the product is, is the brand, where every interaction reinforces the relationship, not just the top of funnel marketing. Remember the Tylenol story from the top of the show? Johnson and Johnson didn't have to scramble to find their values during a crisis. They had already built them in. And that's the challenge for all of us.

Todd Henry [00:33:37]:

Not during the crisis, not during the quarterly review when the numbers dip right now in the ordinary Tuesday afternoon decisions, that's where love gets designed in or drifts out. That's where brand power gets built in or bolted on. So here's my challenge for you this week. Pick one experience that you're responsible for. It could be a product, a meeting, an onboarding process, a client touchpoint. And ask yourself Marcus's question. Are people coming away going, I liked it or I loved it. And if it's not love, Lee Fung's question is where in the journey does the connection bring? Not in the brochure, not in the pitch deck.

Todd Henry [00:34:15]:

It's in the actual lived experience of the thing. You can't bolt on what matters most. You have to build it in. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like the full version of all of our interviews, you can get them absolutely free@dailycreativeplus.com just go there, enter your name and email address, and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of our interviews in their entirety. My name is Todd Henry. You can find my books and my speaking events@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.

Todd Henry [00:34:49]:

We'll see you then.