What Does a Love Affair with Transformational Consumers Look Like?

This whole behavior-changing business scenario could have played out a totally different way. It’s already starting to, in some of the great businesses of our time. Th e fl ip-side conclusion of Moss’s investigation is that businesses are in the position to understand how to change and infl uence people’s behavior, even the hardest ones to change. There’s nothing that says companies can’t wield that influence for good, instead of for evil.

From this vantage point, the Transformational Consumer framework poses a challenge, a revolutionary new possibility: what if companies used what we know about building habits and changing behavior to help people create the healthy, prosperity-inducing habits that people are out there trying to build on their own? What if we aligned our business models with people’s personal goals for themselves, to change their behavior for the healthier, wealthier, and wiser?

Massive, massive change, that’s what would happen. Healthy, prosperous people whose behavior aligns with their higher hopes and dreams for their lives.

And the consumer response to businesses would change, too. Love and long-term, sustainable profi tability. That would happen, too.

These “what ifs” point to an alternative realm of possibility for company-customer relationships, a path beyond the epidemics of distrust and disengagement. In this new realm, business becomes a force for beneficial transformation in individual customers’ lives. There, companies and their customers have real, deep, lasting connections. Customers look forward excitedly to the opportunity to buy their products, tell their friends about it, open, click, like, and review.

I’ve seen it happen, firsthand. I saw it when I worked with HGTV, when I worked at Trulia, and defi nitely as the chief marketer for MyFitnessPal. This new possibility for business is anxiously waiting in the wings, just itching to replace the tired status quo of companies begging for attention, stuck and limited by disgust and disengagement.

In this new realm, customers are the hero of their own life journey. Th ey take on a never-ending series of quests to change their lives for the better, coming back from each quest challenged and changed. Every time they go out on a quest to live a healthier, wealthier, wiser life, they seek and fi nd mentors, advisers, and tools to help them overcome their challenges.

And every time they return home from a quest, they inspire their friends and loved ones to go out on life-changing quests of their own—to be the heroes of their own journeys.

In this new realm, these thriving, engaging companies have a single thing in common: they are the knowledgeable mentor, the compassionate adviser, and the invaluable, transformational tools these customers can’t bear to be without (and can’t stop telling their friends and loved ones about, either).

This new future is already reality for start-ups like the ones I mentioned earlier. It is also the new reality for much-larger, more mature incumbent, nondigital companies, such as CVS/health and Target. It is possible for companies in the health, fitness, and lifestyle-design industries, but it is also already manifesting itself for companies in much less obvious verticals, such as Airbnb and Apple.

There is a uniquely human force that these brands have all tapped into, whether by design or out of their sheer love for their users. This force is bigger than any brand, bigger than any product, bigger even than any demographic group—even millennials, even boomers, even moms.

This future, in which companies engage in wild, two-way love aff airs with their customers by helping them along their journeys, is available to any company or brand that gets serious about tapping into this force.

It is available to you and your company.

This force is the human drive for transformation.

And the companies that are tapping into this force have pioneered a path to the other end of the engagement spectrum, with their customers and employees.

They are consistently ranked as the most innovative companies in the world. They are consistently ranked among the most beloved, engaging brands. They consistently achieve stellar growth and beat their competition. They are consistently crowned the best places to work.

By helping their target audience make the critical life changes they crave, these companies have become linchpins in the lives of a powerful group of consumers. They have engineered—and sometimes reengineered— everything about their business to serve Transformational Consumers.

And Transformational Consumers are responding. They engage in love affairs with the companies that help them change their lives, their habits, their bodies, and their finances for the better all the time. But these love affairs don’t always look the way you might expect. Brand-love, affi nity, or sentiment metrics begin to capture the emotion of this phenomenon, but they do little to reveal the profound business impact of the “love” of a Transformational Consumer.

Some of those love affairs are wild and rollicking and sexy. The love of some Transformational Consumers for lululemon gear or SoulCycle spin classes is something they proudly proclaim, literally wearing their hearts on their sleeves (and headbands and pant legs). This doesn’t mean these relationships are necessarily short-term infatuations. Rather, the branding and subject matter and life-improving impact of these brands has enough power and cachet that people tend to talk about them, a lot.

But many Transformational Consumer love affairs with the products that make their lives healthier, wealthier, and wiser look much more like a long, lovely, devoted marriage than a heady entanglement. Customers may not wander about starry-eyed or head over heels, but they do read the blog every day. They do open the newsletters. They do share the content. Th ey do buy or use the product every day, week, month, or every time it becomes relevant in their lives. They do tell their friends, when asked, what their go-to budget or online learning software is and who their go-to real estate broker, life coach, CPA, or insurance agent is.

I may not go about wearing T-shirts proclaiming my love for my go-to protein powder, but I buy it every month.

Unprecedented growth, beating the competition, lifelong customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth referrals: that’s what it looks like when Transformational Consumers engage in lifelong love affairs with the companies that help them change their lives.