Most B2B companies obsess over the tech and innovation needed to bring the best products to market. But when it comes to making those products feel personal and deeply valuable to the people actually using them, brands can be shockingly shortsighted.
That’s why Ari Yablok (VP of Brand at Island) thinks it’s time for B2B to embrace “unreasonable hospitality,” a concept borrowed from world-class restaurants that are obsessed with anticipating guest needs in almost magical ways. Why? Because when you build your product with the same obsessive attention to detail that a Michelin-star chef brings to each dish, brand stops being marketing and starts being experience.
Ari recently dropped by our Best Story Wins podcast to share more about how this philosophy can transform the way B2B brands function, and his perspective is an important reminder that a customer-first approach is always a winning strategy.
When Products Stop Being Tools and Start Being “Theirs”
Here’s what most B2B companies miss: Building a product that works well is table stakes. Building a product that feels like it was designed specifically for your customer’s life? That’s where brand advantage lives.
When customers feel that level of care, something shifts. The product stops being just a tool they use and becomes “their” product. And that emotional attachment creates the kind of loyalty that competitors can’t easily displace.
As Ari points out, the key to cultivating that experience is applying “unreasonable hospitality” everywhere from product development to customer touch points. Here’s how to do that in ways that make your brand feel less like a vendor and more like a partner who genuinely cares.
1) Put Your R&D Team on Customer Calls
Most B2B companies keep their developers locked away, far from actual customers. Product managers gather feedback and file tickets, while team roadmaps get updated on quarterly cycles. It’s a process that’s clean, organized, and missing a massive opportunity.
Ari and his team at Island do it differently. Island is an enterprise browser built to help businesses provide secure access to web applications and data, but the individual user experience is everything. That’s why Island puts programmers, product managers, team leads, and tech leads on calls to solve problems. This spurs on-the-spot innovation, as Ari says an issue brought up on one call can inspire them to build a feature that could be done in days.
When your developers hear directly from customers about what’s frustrating them, they don’t just build features faster—they build the right features. And customers feel the difference between “here’s what we think you need” and “we heard you, and we built this for you.”
Tip: Start breaking down the walls between R&D and customers. Begin with quarterly customer calls where engineers can listen and ask questions. As you build trust, move toward real-time collaboration where technical teams can solve problems on the spot.
2) Design for How Work Actually Happens
Island’s philosophy of “design for work” isn’t about adding more features. It’s about thinking deeply about how work actually happens and smoothing out every rough edge along the way.
Similarly, a great restaurant doesn’t just serve good food; they notice you’re left-handed and move your water glass without being asked. These tiny details create the feeling that someone’s paying attention. The same principle applies to B2B products. When you design with genuine empathy for your customer’s workflow, you start noticing opportunities to eliminate annoyances and create small moments of delight. That is where the true essence of the brand lives.
The goal isn’t perfection; it’s thoughtfulness. It’s the willingness to go from good enough to obsessively caring about the details that most companies would overlook.
Tip: Map your customer’s actual workflow (not the idealized version you think they have). Identify the small frustrations they’ve accepted as “just how it is.” Those frustrations are your opportunities to show unreasonable hospitality.
3) Make Hospitality Cultural, Not Departmental
Unreasonable hospitality can’t live in just one department. If your product team is obsessively thoughtful but your sales team is robotic, the experience breaks.
At Island, this philosophy extends from how they build features to how they show up at trade shows to how their support team solves problems. When every touchpoint reflects the same level of care, something compounds. Customers start to feel like this isn’t just a company that happens to care about them; this is a company that’s fundamentally different from everyone else they work with.
Tip: Audit your customer journey for “hospitality gaps”—those moments where you’re functional but not thoughtful. Pick three of these moments this quarter and ask: How could we make this feel more like we genuinely care about this person’s experience?
4) Track Emotional Signals, Not Just Usage Metrics
Traditional B2B metrics focus on product usage, feature adoption, support ticket resolution time, etc. These are all important, but none of them capture whether you’ve achieved what unreasonable hospitality aims for.
The real goal? Emotional attachment. Creating that moment where your product stops being “the tool we use” and becomes “our tool.” When customers develop possessive language around your product, it means it feels like it belongs to them.
This matters because emotional attachment creates a competitive moat that features alone can’t build. When customers feel your product was designed for them, they’re not just comparing feature lists anymore. They’re comparing the feeling of using your product (home) versus starting over with someone new (risk).
Tip: In customer interviews, listen for possessive language. When customers say “my tool” or “our system” instead of “the product,” that’s a signal you’ve moved beyond functionality into emotional territory. Track these signals alongside your traditional metrics—they’re early indicators of long-term loyalty.
Making Hospitality Your Competitive Advantage
You don’t need to transform your entire company overnight. Pick one area where you can experiment with being unreasonably hospitable. Maybe it’s how your onboarding team welcomes new customers. Maybe it’s how your support team goes beyond solving tickets to anticipating needs. Start small, learn what works, and expand from there.
The key is making hospitality a cultural value, not just a marketing talking point. If it’s only something you say but don’t practice, customers will feel that gap immediately. Talk about it in team meetings, celebrate examples of team members going above and beyond, and make it clear that thoughtfulness isn’t just an “extra” but how you do business.
You’ll also need to empower teams to go beyond their job descriptions. Unreasonable hospitality often means doing things that aren’t technically your responsibility. Can your support engineer loop in the right person when they notice a customer struggling with something outside their ticket? Can your sales rep make a prospect’s life easier even if it’s not directly related to closing the deal?
Remember: The best hospitality anticipates needs before customers articulate them. This requires deep empathy, close listening, and a willingness to invest in understanding your customers’ lives, not just their pain points. When you approach your product and your brand with that level of thoughtfulness, customers don’t just buy from you. They feel seen by you. And that feeling creates loyalty that no feature set alone can match.
If you want to learn more about how Island built a brand that breaks the B2B mold, listen to our full conversation with Ari Yablok on the Best Story Wins podcast. And if you’re looking for ways to bring more customer-first thinking into your own brand and content strategy, let’s talk about how we can help you work smarter and win your market.
