The Transformational Consumer

Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with Your Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser

Tara-Nicholle Nelson

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781626568839
• eBook ISBN: 9781626568853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

The Transformational Consumer They are the most valuable, least understood customers of our time. They buy over $4 trillion in life-improving products and services every year. If you serve their deeply human need to continually improve their lives, they will eagerly engage with your brand at a time when most people are tuning out corporate messages. They are Transformational Consumers, and no one knows them like Tara-Nicholle Nelson. Her Transformational Consumer insights powered her work at MyFitnessPal, which grew from 40 million to 100 million users in her time there. Nelson takes readers on a hero's journey to connecting with customers in ways both profitable and transformational. After going inside the brains, emotions, and behaviors of Transformational Consumers, Tara issues a call to adventure: a rallying cry to leaders to shift their focus from simply making products to solving their customers' problems. Nelson uses stories and cases studies from every industry to guide readers through this journey in five stages, shedding light on how to rethink their customers, their products and services, their marketing, their competition, and even their culture. The key to growing a business today is not building an app or getting new social media followers. The key is engaging people over and over again by triggering their deep, human desire for growth and transformation.When a company reorients every initiative to serve Transformational Consumers, it kick-starts a lifelong love affair with its customers—a love affair that results in unprecedented revenue growth, product innovation, and employee engagement.

CHAPTER ONE
Meet the Transformational Consumer

You see, technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change: Electrons change their energy levels. Molecules change their bonds. Elements combine and change into compounds. But that’s all of life, right? It’s the constant, it’s the cycle. It’s solution, dissolution. Just over and over and over. It is growth, then decay, then transformation. It’s fascinating really. It’s a shame so many of us never take time to consider its implications.

—WALTER WHITE, BREAKING BAD, SEASON 1, EPISODE 1

TRANSFORMATIONAL TAKEAWAYS

1. The Personal Disruption Conundrum is the number-one limiting factor of Transformational Consumers.

2. Transformational Consumers are HUMAN.

3. Any product is transformational if people buy it with the motivation of living a healthier, wealthier, and wiser life.

A friend of mine goes by the name of Coach Stevo. Stevo is a sports psychologist and an expert in habit formation. But he got his start as a regular old personal trainer. In fact, in the very earliest days of his career, he was a trainer with a serious niche: people preparing to take the Marine Corps physical exam. He himself had gone from fat to fit in preparation for the Marine physical, and he wanted to pass on what he’d learned. The way he tells it, he would give these cadet hopefuls a program to follow and tell them what to do, and they’d do it.

Done and done.

And then one day, into Stevo’s gym walked a woman we’ll call Sister Mary Catherine, a retired Irish Catholic nun. It would be foolhardy to let Sister Mary Catherine’s soft middle distract you from what would turn out to be her razor-sharp tongue. But Stevo was up for the challenge—he started telling her what to do, giving her exercises and a workout plan to follow, but things didn’t quite go as predictably as they had with hisuber-motivated clients in the past. She struggled to make progress.

At one point, Sister Mary Catherine called out a big problem she’d seen, something she felt posed the danger of setting her relationship with Stevo up for failure.

She decided to clear things up for her intrepid trainer. “I know what to do,” she declared. “I need you to help me make myself do it.”

Sister Mary Catherine was what you might call a character. And like all characters, she presented at least one of the elemental characteristics that make up the archetype (that archetype being “Transformational Consumer”). Once we understand an archetype, engaging with the individual characters that spring out of the archetype is a much more vivid, much richer, more real experience. Understand “gangster,” and “Don Corleone” is a different, more nuanced being.

Sister Mary Catherine’s comment—“I can’t make myself do the things I want or need to do”—is the essence of what I call the Personal Disruption Conundrum. The Personal Disruption Conundrum is the number-one limiting factor of people who invest a great deal of their time and money into projects to get healthier, wealthier, or wiser: Transformational Consumers.

Let’s explore the core characteristics of the archetype: Transformational Consumers’ minds, beliefs, and consumer patterns. This is the first step to engaging with the real Transformational Consumers, the real people, the real characters in your customer base or audience. It’s also the fi rst step to helping them take this limit off themselves— and unlimiting your business in the process.

The Defining Characteristics of a Transformational Consumer

Transformational Consumers are the citizens of the world and the web who view life as a continual series of personal disruption campaigns: behavior-change projects to live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives.

They gladly, excitedly invest their time and money on the products, services, and content that can help them solve the Personal Disruption Conundrum.

They are early adopters of new products and technologies that they believe might be able to further their transformational aspirations. They are also highly influential: they influence the buying behavior of everyone around them.

Transformational Consumers engage in joyful, two-way love affairs with the brands that change their lives: using them over and over again, devouring their content, and telling everyone they know about the brands and products that have transformed their lives.

There are five core characteristics of Transformational Consumers. I find them easier to remember with the acronym HUMAN.

H—Focus on joyful prosperity: healthier, wealthier, and wiser

U—See life as an unending series of personal disruption campaigns

M—Have an extreme growth (versus fixed) mindset

A—Have innate or learned bias toward action

N—Engage in a never-ending search to find products, services, and content that support their behavior-change goals

I have worked from this list of characteristics for years, just on the basis of my own observations and insights doing the work of engaging Transformational Consumers. But as I was working on this book, my company, Transformational Consumer Insights (TCI), partnered with the research technology platform Qualtrics to survey 2,000 U.S. consumers. The objective? To quantify how mainstream this Transformational Consumer phenomenon has become since those days at my parents’ racquet club.

The answer we found was undeniable: very mainstream. In this survey, the Inaugural Transformational Consumer Insights Study, ¹ a full 50% of respondents said they use digital or real-world products at least several times a week in an effort to achieve any of a number of health, financial, career, or personal-development aims.

I repeat for emphasis: 50% of U.S. consumers are Transformational Consumers. This is not a niche.

Keep in mind, as we learn more about these people, that the last characteristic—consumers’ never-ending hunt for products and services and content that support their transformational aspirations—is the single thing that qualifies people as Transformational Consumers.

This tells us what these people do, in terms of their consumer behavior.

So what are the other four characteristics? They help flesh out the framework in a critical way. They add meaningful, human insight that explains why these people do the things they do, why their consumer behavior is so influenced by their desire to make these core life changes. Th ese instinctive insights were validated when the data showed that people who qualified as Transformational Consumers were more likely to possess all of the other four characteristics than non-Transformational Consumers were, to a statistically signifi cant degree.

Now, let’s take the characteristics, one by one.

H—Focus on Joyful Prosperity: Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser

The content, the substance, of Transformational Consumers’ aspirations that power their consumer behavior is that they simply want to be healthier, wealthier, and wiser. They want to live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives.

I call this desire the pursuit of joyful prosperity. From now on, we’ll call healthy, wealthy, and wise, collectively, the Aspirations, with a capital A, or refer to them as HWW. ²

In our seminal Transformational Consumer study, we listed a dozen common goals that people set around their HWW Aspirations. We then asked respondents to identify any of these goals that they were currently taking any action—anything—to pursue.

Transformational Consumers overindexed on every single goal, meaning they were more likely than the average to be working on every one of the health, wealth, or wisdom goals specified. When compared against non-Transformational Consumers, Transformational Consumers were anywhere from two to four times as likely to be working on a given HWW goal (see table 1).

Table 1 Comparing the Percentage of Transformational, non-Transformational, and Overall Consumers Actively Trying to Reach Various Goals

Q: I am currently doing something to try to reach the following goals:

Here’s a point you’ll hear me make over and over: it does not matter how you or I might define which life experiences and subject matters fall within or outside the boundaries of healthy, wealthy, or wise.

What matters is how the Transformational Consumers view, experience, or define healthy, wealthy, and wise.

And they experience them broadly. Table 2 depicts just some of the areas of life (and spending) that Transformational Consumers often group within each of the three Aspirations. (Note the overlap. Humans and the way we think about our lives are simply not cut and dry.)

Wise, in particular, can be a little nebulous. It includes anything Transformational Consumers might do in the effort to become a better person, to become self-actualized, or to fulfill their potential in the world.

Transformational Consumers experience the Aspirations as similar, related, and overlapping, in a few different ways.

The first common thread running through the Aspirations is this: that healthy, wealthy, and wise are universally viewed as necessary cornerstones of the good life. You can debate how each of them is defined, but no one rea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue Thirty Years of Transformation
• Introduction How to Transcend the Transactional
• Chapter One Meet the Transformational Consumer
• Chapter Two Removing Resistance and Triggering Progress
• Chapter Three The Hero’s Journey of Your Transformational Consumer
• Chapter Four Your Call to Adventure
• Chapter Five Rethink What You Sell
• Chapter Six Rethink Your Customer
• Chapter Seven Rethink Your Marketing
• Chapter Eight Rethink Your Competition
• Chapter Nine Rethink Your Culture
• Conclusion Transcendence: The Natural State of Things
• The Transformational Consumer Self-Assessment What Do You Need to Rethink First?
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author