CHAPTER THREE
The Hero’s Journey of Your Transformational Consumer

There ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

—DAVID MITCHELL

It’s illuminating to think of a Transformational Consumer’s journey toward achieving any individual HWW goal as unfolding along the story line of the Hero’s Journey. In case you’re not familiar with it, the Hero’s Journey is an archetypal story model, a recurring story pattern that human beings have been telling, hearing, reading, and watching since the beginning of time.

In a Hero’s Journey, as explained by Joseph Campbell, who first identified the universality of this story line, “a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” ¹

Story experts and mythologists have unpacked the universal Hero’s Journey into a long list of sequential steps and elements. (If you’d like to dive deeper, I encourage you to read Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.) ² For our purposes, though, the most important elements of the Hero’s Journey include

   The hero (your customer)

   A quest for transformation that involves a journey away from everything the hero has ever known (life, health, prosperity, or personal growth goal; aim to change from the status quo), in which the hero encounters

   Enemies and villains (Resistance of all sorts)

   Mentors, allies, guides, or tools (these can be lots of things, including your company, your product, your services, your content, etc.)

   A battle and victory (progress of all sorts, including behavior change or completion of a goal)

   The return home, as a changed being, with new skills, resources, and assets (your customers’ healthier, wealthier, wiser life and newfound momentum, confidence, and knowledge of how to change things in their lives).

This archetypal story is encoded in our collective human memory, our cells, and our neurons. Nearly every Bible story, fairy tale fable, and even most modern movies and media narratives unfold along this plotline. Jesus Christ, Luke Skywalker, Harriett Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and Erin Brockovich: these all count as heroes whose journeys we know, whether or not we love them.

Let’s take a deeper look at a few individual Transformational Consumers and their effort to pursue some of the most common HWW goals of Transformational Consumers. Watch how these journeys unfold along the same story points as the Hero’s Journey. You’ll soon begin to see how companies like yours can and do help Transformational Consumers vanquish the villain of Resistance and make progress on their quests, achieving the most important objectives of the business in the process.

Latent in your hero-customers’ journeys are all sorts of untapped possibilities for ways you can help them make progress, pointing you to opportunities for innovation, new product features, and marketing messages and campaigns. But to get that value from the journey, you must first unlimit your thinking about what’s allowed beyond the obvious, expanding your own universe of what you understand as permissible or possible ways for a company to be a mentor, ally, guide, or tool.

Note that the role of Transformer companies in these Transformational Consumers’ hero-customer quests generally aligns to the role of mentor, ally, guide, or tool. Mentors, allies, and guides tend to be service providers or content programs. They are more likely to be local businesses than tools are. In fact, if your business is your own personal services as a coach, therapist, personal trainer, financial planner, real estate broker, retreat producer, or health-care provider, you yourself might literally be your herocustomer’s mentor, ally, or guide.

Beyond the obvious, there are a couple of ways in which Transformer companies serve these roles for Transformational Consumers that are much subtler but represent most of Transformational Consumer spending and brand interactions along their HWW journeys. Apps, platforms, and even brand-published content can serve as a tool with which your herocustomers ultimately unlimits themselves into their transformed life.

The tools you can provide to help power your customer-heroes’ journeys also include supplies. The transformational journey can be uncomfortable; by definition, it involves a journey away from what’s known, a change from the status quo, a foray away from the dopamine-fueled comforts of loafing, inertia, bad habits, and salty, sugary, fatty convenience foods. It almost always involves more work than the status quo did.

An enormous portion of what Transformational Consumers are constantly on the lookout for is new, beneficial versions of the old things they used to buy—supplies for the new version of their life that they are still likely to eat or use but are more healthful, are more financially frugal or efficient or luxurious, and/or that represent or enable smarter decisions than the old versions did. Think of supplies as tools to sustain transformation: supplies that customers can bring back with them to stay on track in their newly transformed lives. This is a powerful way that consumer packaged goods, food, and apparel companies can fulfill their potential to become Transformers.

One more note: while these stories might strike you as extreme, they are actually compilations of real-life stories of Transformational Consumers from our research, online listening, and our lives.

Christopher: A Customer-Hero’s Journey to Healthier

Christopher, a 46-year-old financial officer, had been an athlete in high school and still thought of himself that way. But like so many others, he found himself in a desk job after college. Weekends were spent with the kids, and the pounds piled on. His doctor had mentioned that he should get some sort of fitness routine going, and he had tried running—he even joined a gym a couple of years back. He was still paying the gym dues but only made it there maybe once or twice a month, in a fit of inspiration. He told himself he’d go back after he closed this big deal. But there always seemed to be another big deal on its tail.

Then four small, but extraordinary, things happened in a single week. On Friday, the doctor’s office rang to say that Christopher’s blood work showed that he was prediabetic. Christopher immediately turned to Google and started reading about how many people believed that different diets could reverse prediabetes. This gave him some level of hope. He ate a salad that night but gave into the temptation of dessert.

On Saturday, he pulled on some old running gear and realized he was completely out of breath less than two blocks from home. Ugh.

On Sunday at church, he caught a glimpse of himself in the window as he walked up and was actually startled at the not-at-all-distorted image of himself. He couldn’t really believe that overweight, middle-age man had replaced the youthful athlete he still saw in his mental mirror. Restrictive diets don’t work, he told himself as he helped himself to a second helping of scalloped potatoes at Sunday brunch.

On Monday, he got a Facebook message from an old work friend who was back in town, asking to meet up for a drink after work. Excited to see his old friend, Christopher went to meet him at the pub and was shocked and stunned to see his friend looking so trim and full of energy. He looked younger than he had five years ago. His friend mentioned having done an AIDS Lifecycle (ALC) bike ride from Chicago to Minneapolis a few years back, after losing a friend to AIDS. That had kick-started a new way of life.

Heading back to the office, Christopher was pensive, opting to take the stairs, which he knew was the healthy choice, despite having rarely chosen it. As he huffed and puffed his way up the stairs, wondering when they added all those extra flights between the ground and his office, he knew one thing for sure: if his friend could do that bike ride, he could do it, too.

Christopher was a competitive guy. Seeing his friend in such fine mettle had reignited that spark. He decided it was about time he harnessed that energy into something that was good for himself, not just for making money (though he liked making money plenty). It was also so much more energizing to think about setting a goal of doing this ride than thinking about managing blood-sugar levels or hitting a goal weight. So the same night as he saw his friend, he mentioned it to his wife and then, before he went to sleep, Googled “AIDS Lifecycle” on his iPad.

Christopher went to the orientation for the bike ride and realized that the time commitment was not insignificant: every Saturday, most of the day, for what boiled down to the first month of the year. He’d also have to raise several thousand dollars for charity. The nearest ride to his home was from San Francisco to Los Angeles. After talking with his family, who were excited at his enthusiasm and the prospect of him taking better care of himself, he made a decision to throw himself into this for six months and signed up.

The next step was to gear up. The ALC trainers gave him a list of gear he’d need, and he spent a Saturday with his kids at the local sports superstore getting everything. He downloaded Strava, the cycling app, and MyFitnessPal and synced the two. He got a huge rush from watching the cumulative annual miles ridden on Strava rack up.

Almost immediately, once he started training and tracking, his craving for soda disappeared, and he also cut his alcohol consumption once he logged a beer and realized it had the same number of calories as he’d just burned on a two-hour bike ride he’d just completed. He got really into prepping meals on the weekend for work, and his wife joined him. They also made some simple household food rules, like this: that they could have a drink or eat dessert anytime they wanted when they were out but would not stock ice cream or alcohol in the house.

This health thing had officially become a family affair.

Christopher’s energy levels came up, and while he was very occupied with training on the weekends, he felt like he was having more fun with his kids the rest of the time. He felt mentally quicker and just lighter. In fact, he was, having lost 30 pounds in the first 90 days of training. He hadn’t weighed himself, so he didn’t even realize he’d lost that much weight. His doctor pointed it out when he came in to revisit the prediabetes, which had also resolved. That realization was a big morale and momentum boost, as were the comments made by his friends on MyFitnessPal and Facebook, as he shared the link to his fund-raising page for the ride.

He began to look forward to his weekend training sessions and to seeing the other people in his training cohort. When his knee began to bother him, a few other guys suggested he cross-train and invited him to come to Crossfit with them. He went and ultimately got his wife to become a Crossfitter, too. They both started experimenting with the Paleo diet and even started reading up on “ancestral health” online.

Christopher and his wife decided that they would set up a whole-family reward for making it through the intense training schedule when the ride was done and spent a few weeks emailing each other links from Jetsetter, TripAdvisor, and Airbnb. They ultimately decided they wanted to expose their kids to new cultures and to service, so they signed on to their church’s mission trip to Peru, which they would follow with a summer vacation through the rain forest and to Machu Picchu.

From January to June, Christopher worked up to be ready for the sevenday, 600-mile ride. He felt very supported and almost no anxiety about the ride itself, given the incredible logistics machine that the folks running the ride had put together and the organization they had already demonstrated throughout the months of training.

On ride day, just before Christopher left home, he dropped a Facebook message to his old work buddy sharing about some other things he’d dropped, thanks, in part, to his friend’s example: 50 pounds, prediabetes, and a sedentary family lifestyle. After the ride and the trip, both of which were life changing, Christopher found himself excited to see his friends at Crossfit, and he and his wife were home less than a week before they were plugged right back into those workouts.

Terese: A Customer-Hero’s Journey to Wealthier

Terese is a 37-year-old single mom. She was a paralegal until recently. After her divorce, she decided to pursue the dream of being a lawyer that she’d given up when she had her kids 15 years ago. She went back to law school, spent five years completing a part-time program, and just recently graduated.

After Terese passed the bar exam, she secured an attorney job at the same firm she’d worked at for ten years as a paralegal. Once she saw her first paycheck and, more importantly, how much had been withheld for taxes, she asked her Facebook friends for a referral to a CPA and a financial planner, both of whom had the same advice: it’s time to buy a house. The mortgage-interest deduction would be a great boost to affordability, and for the first time ever, her kids could walk to school and stop bickering about sharing a room.

Terese had owned a home with her husband but not on her own. She’d actually always had a tendency to buy lots of clothes and dinners out, so she wasn’t even sure she could afford to do this. First thing, she mentioned her plan to her parents, who gave her $10,000 toward her down payment. (That made exactly $10,000 she had to put down!) She asked her Facebook friends (again) for their real estate broker recommendations and called up a couple. They told her she needed to get preapproved for a loan, and she spoke with the mortgage broker whom a couple had recommended.

That call was illuminating, if a bit distressing. Terese’s income was stellar, but her credit history was troubled. Some credit-card bills had fallen through the cracks during the divorce, and a couple were in collections. Those needed resolving, and her credit score was about 100 points lower than it needed to be to qualify for a mortgage. The mortgage broker also told her that she needed to save up another $50,000 or $75,000 to buy the sort of home she wanted in the sort of area she wanted, as well as establishing some credit accounts on her own and keeping them in good standing for a while.

The first thing she did was to Google around looking first for fast workarounds. But most other folks on the frugality subreddit discussion board agreed with her mortgage broker that a quick fix was not the answer to these issues. So she started searching the web to learn how others had tackled these projects. For a couple of months, she lagged. It just seemed like too much to take on, on top of everything else she was dealing with. Then one day a friend, a single woman she knew, invited Terese to her housewarming party. And that flicked a mental switch.

Terese decided to get organized, do some math, and set up a timeline. She went to Mint and set up a dashboard, putting her checking, savings, and credit-card accounts online. She set up a “save for a house” goal in Mint, targeting a $75,000 savings target, on top of the money her parents had given her.

She realized it would take her about two years to save that cash at her current spend rate, but she could do it six months faster if she cut out about $1,500 in monthly expenses, which Mint showed she could do by cutting down on eating out and prepared foods and her personal-trainer bill. She made a commitment to cook more at home and spent some time educating herself on meal planning, meal preparation, and recipes, all online. She got organized and systematic about her grocery lists and also started a family outing to the farmer’s market every week (where organics were much cheaper, she’d learned).

She teamed up with a few other moms in her neighborhood to do a weekly slow-cooker club, which required her to first buy a slow cooker! She ordered it, along with a couple of healthy slow-cooker cookbooks, on Amazon. She also invested in all-new glass food storage when some of the other moms scoffed at her plasticware, urging her to research BPA leaching online. That took her down an Internet rabbit hole in which she educated herself about phthalates, parabens, and other toxins. She spent the next weekend throwing out old bath washes and replacing them with Dr. Bronner’s liquid castile soap, tossing out all sorts of household cleaners and restocking them with Seventh Generation and Method, and replacing body products and cosmetics with coconut oil and natural counterparts.

That same weekend, she searched Yelp to find a few new group exercise studios in the area, ultimately signing up for ClassPass once she realized it would allow her limitless access to boutique fitness studios for the same price as two of her trainer sessions.

She went to CreditKarma.com, which she’d read about on a number of blogs online. She pulled her credit scores and started working on them, first contacting the collection agencies and paying off those accounts, disputing a few inaccuracies, and finally, finding a couple of credit cards she could use to rebuild her own credit, sans husband.

She spent a little time thinking about what she could do to bring more cash in, too. In the process, she met with her family lawyer and realized she had agreed to way less child support than she was entitled to, under the law of her state. Despite her dread of the conversation, she scheduled a meeting with her ex-husband, and he agreed to pay several hundred dollars more every month. Emboldened by her successful foray into speaking up for herself, she also went to Hired and Glassdoor to compare her salary against others but found that her salary was in line with other first-year attorneys. At a friend’s suggestion, she even looked at how people made money on Airbnb, concluding that when she was ready, she would aim to buy a duplex so she could rent the other unit out as an Airbnb host, which would free up a little cash so she didn’t have to live on such a tight budget.

Before long, Terese’s go-to apps were Mint, where she’d check her rapidly accelerating goal progress; Houzz, where she’d fantasize about home styles and decor to stay inspired; and Pinterest, where she also pinned home-design fantasies and recipes. She was constantly on Trulia and Zillow, which she’d pop open all the time to keep track of home-price trends and just to see what was for sale in her dream neighborhoods at any given moment in time. She even went to open houses on the weekends.

She continued working with the financial planner and CPA, who helped her create an estate plan, secure life and disability insurance, and open her first ever retirement accounts while she was working on getting ready to buy a home. They also encouraged her to meet with a banker at her regular bank, who offered her a secured credit card that helped her credit score advance faster, too.

Almost exactly 18 months after her first conversation with the mortgage broker, Credit Karma indicated that her score had hit its target. She reconnected with the mortgage broker, got preapproved, and started house hunting in earnest, becoming a home owner six months later. She didn’t buy a duplex, but she did buy a home with a tiny house in the backyard that she rented out on Airbnb when the kids were with their dad.

Having come through so much to get there, she felt like Superwoman, like she could do anything. After devoting a few months to getting the house furnished to her liking and getting the kids settled into school, Terese started itching to tackle another big goal. She’d always wanted to run a marathon, actually.

Giulia: A Customer-Hero’s Journey to Wiser

Giulia is a 31-year-old midlevel manager at a major tech company. She grew up in Colorado and has always been smarter than the average bear. During her first job after college, from which she was the first in her family to graduate, she quickly realized that a career path of lifelong growth would be possible only in a bigger market. So she moved to the West Coast and got a job at an agency and then took an in-house marketing job.

Lately, Giulia had been feeling a low-grade, steady state of frustration and stuckness at work. She knew it’s normal to have the so-called Sundaynight blues, but lately it’d been more like a feeling of anxiety, depression, and terror than a reluctance to see the recreation of the weekend come to a close. She chalked some of it up to changes at work: she got into her new company when the awesome little start-up she worked for was acquired by the big behemoth, and she was feeling disempowered by being one of thousands of employees where she was once one of hundreds. She’d been struggling to make the case for the resources she needed to do the projects she’d been assigned to do and was feeling unheard and disrespected.

She was also struggling with the feeling that it was her job to market something she didn’t care about and didn’t believe in, that all she did for a living was to help an already big, already profitable company make even more money.

Giulia kept saying to her friends that she felt like there had to be more out there for her than this. She was well paid and was not really motivated by trying to make more money. She just felt like she was marking time and was definitely not doing what she was put here on the planet to do. She knew she is very smart but also had no idea what she would like to do with the next season of her career. She felt like she might not be qualified to do anything but what she was already doing, for a company similar to the one she worked at. She would’ve liked to feel like she was working on something that would help people or change their lives.

Then she clicked on a Business Insider post that came up in her Facebook feed, titled “10 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Day Job.” Immediately thereafter, she spent an hour sprucing up her LinkedIn profile and browsing the job listings suggested by the site, without consciously realizing what she was doing. She felt nervous but also excited and in that moment decided she was going to make some moves to quit her hated day job and level up her career.

She decided to gear up for this big move the way she had for other big moves she’d made in life. She went back to the yoga class she used to go to regularly, because it made her feel calmer and more grounded, soothing her job-related feelings of being trapped and aimless. She also started using her Headspace app again, using it to get back into the calming habit of meditating ten minutes every morning.

After just a couple of days of that, she spent some time after dinner a few nights messing around on her company’s internal job site, on LinkedIn, and on Google, letting her mind kind of run free envisioning different scenarios for her next career season. Maybe she’d start a business or change careers entirely; she’d always been interested in health, actually. Maybe she could be a personal trainer or work for a health company. She wasn’t sure, but after searching “career change” online, she ordered Martha Beck’s book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want and started working her way through it. ³

Her insurance covered therapy, so she signed up for ten sessions with a therapist who was also a certified career coach to help her get an organized game plan in place. The coach encouraged her to sign up for an eCourse on starting a small business, which she had always been interested in. At the same time, she got her company to cover her tuition for a digital-marketing course at General Assembly, and she started investigating both an MBA program and a yoga-teacher training that would take place later in the year. (She found all of these on Google and voraciously read the reviews before signing up.)

She also started attending more conferences and meet-ups in her town, even on topics she wasn’t particularly interested in. With her coach’s help, she practiced a little elevator pitch and started introducing herself to interesting people she met at these events, including some of the speakers. She also started asking her friends to keep an eye out for opportunities for her. She told them she was looking for a role in which she felt like her work would be valued internally, while also making a difference in the world.

One of the speakers she met was hosting a career-development retreat, which she decided to splurge on in the name of “investing in” herself. There, she got clear that she wasn’t really interested in working as a solopreneur, except maybe as a side business sometime down the road. She went ahead and enrolled in the yoga-teacher training as a way to cultivate her presentation and speaking skills while staying grounded and learning about the body in the process. To boost her confidence, she went shopping online for a new yoga mat and a few new pieces of yoga clothing, discovering that one of her favorite brands, lululemon, had an extensive digital-content marketing program, including a blog she loved.

She thrived in the digital-marketing course and started applying for jobs using those skills at her current company and others. She emailed the other women she’d met at the career retreat, telling them what she was looking for and including a short list of a few companies she was particularly interested in working for in case they knew anyone at any of them. One of those women ultimately introduced her to a hiring manager at lululemon.

She landed a job producing digital content for the company, a role that had a clear and exciting upward path. In her new role, she made time to do some occasional speaking and writing blogs about her transition into a career she loved and even taught a few yoga classes a week. She settled into her new role with a new level of confidence in her ability to speak up and be heard at work and in life and a new level of joy about her ability to make moves, any time she needs to.

Takeaways for Your Transformational Consumers’ Journeys

There are a number of things you can take away from these example customer-hero journeys for your own company’s journey to becoming a beloved mentor, ally, guide, or tool of the Transformational Consumer.

Transformational Journeys Are Not Always Logical or Linear

These journeys occur in stages that you can see repeated over and over again. In simplifying them, I’ve made them more linear than they are in real life. The psychotherapist David Richo says that both the archetypal and the real-life “heroic journey is not a move from point A to point B as in

football, where the purpose is to go from the line of scrimmage to the goal. It is a movement from point A to point A to the thousandth power, as in baseball, where the purpose is to go from home to home with a point made—that is, something to show for the journey.” ⁴

Your hero-customer’s quest and return goes from their lives and selves and back to their lives and selves. When they return, they return with transformation, new habits, new character, new skills, new capabilities, and new discipline in addition to their newly increased health, wealth, and wisdom. But Richo helps us see that the quest and return are not linear, not in a standard Hero’s Journey and not in our Customer-Hero’s Journey. These journeys may include offshoot journeys, pauses, setbacks, and backtracks or progress spurts. Our customer-heroes might not like to admit it, but they are human. And human behaviors, habits, and behavior change rarely operate on clear logic.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have a logical solution to a behavioral, transformational problem, so it’s certain to work. I know companies that offer logical solutions to prediabetes without taking into account that if it were that simple for people to change their eating habits, they wouldn’t be prediabetic in the first place.

Transformational Consumer Goals Frequently Change, Expand, Shrink, and Proliferate

Goals can range from lowering cholesterol to riding 545 miles down the California coast. Dealing with prediabetes should be the easier of these two, but the energy, enthusiasm, motivation, and competitive spark in the ride is what ultimately made the change and carried the day.

HWW Transformational Goals and Journeys Often Overlap, Snowball, and Spread to Other People in Your CustomerHero’s Life

Hard-won success on one goal, like getting out of debt, creates momentum that adds fuel to the baby motivational fire on another goal, such as cooking more at home. Many Transformational Consumers will be engaged in multiple personal disruption goals and efforts at the same time, and the motivational fire from one can fuel the other. The opposite can also be true. When struggling to make progress on one very important goal, some Transformational Consumers will intentionally shut down others to focus on the one that matters the most.

Beyond running a lot of concurrent goals and personal disruption campaigns, the momentum from one mission accomplished can fuel the next goal. The customer-hero has learned that his or her capacity is greater than he or she might have thought and that the realm of possibility is larger than it was before. And he or she takes that expanded belief system and skill set into the future, into new goals and projects. Ask any real estate agent: it’s very common for people who buy homes to lose weight or change jobs in the months after closing.

This transformational snowball effect manifests itself in all sorts of niches. The New York Times reported that people who thrive on a Paleo diet are likely to experiment with other “ancestral health” principles in other areas of their lives. If this diet worked for helping them get control over what they put in their bodies, the thinking goes, maybe it’ll work for what they put on their bodies and demand from their bodies, too. They go from eating a grain-free diet to wearing goggles that block certain spectra of screen light and even giving up their unnatural work hours and night jobs (cavemen did not work the graveyard shift). ⁵

The Force of Relationship Powers Many Transformational Goals

Each of these stories illustrates one of the most powerful forces in transformation of every sort: relationship. Your customer-hero’s mentors, guides, and allies are often people in or through their own social circles who inspire them to go after their goals by virtue of professional advice, competition, accountability, or just sheer partnership. We very often hear from Transformational Consumers that their original acceptance of a given HWW quest took place only after someone they knew was successful at the same thing, like Christopher’s friend who’d gotten fit by doing the ALC ride.

Social contagion is real. People need to connect with each other, and it seems that the discomfort of behavior change is often soothed and made manageable when we connect with others who are making the same changes or are engaged in the activities we aspire to make habitual. This is why boutique exercise studios, workplace fitness challenges, group training experiences, and even financial-goal sites like the reddit frugality channel are so popular: people are more likely to engage in activities that require self-discipline when they are doing them with others.

Here’s some data from MyFitnessPal to prove this point:

   Users who share their food diary with friends lose twice as much weight as other users do.

   Users who have ten or more friends lose, on average, four times as much weight as users who go it alone.

   Fifty-six percent of users said they prefer to exercise in some social context, because they get a better workout that way (65%), they work out harder with friends than they would on their own (50%) or they were flat-out more likely to show up and actually exercise than they would be alone (55%). ⁶

I often saw this same sort of tribal HWW-goal pursuit with my real estate clients: no sooner would I start working with a couple on their lifestyle-design goals with home ownership than they would introduce me to two or three other friends who were trying to buy homes, too. This is the same phenomenon whereby Christopher’s friend infected him, and he in turn infected his wife, with the get-fit bug; whereby Terese and her fellow moms kept each other on track with their cook-at-home goals; and whereby Giulia and her retreat colleagues helped each other do the follow-up work of manifesting their next career seasons.

One more thing: there can be a status component to social contagion around HWW goals. When I worked with Eventbrite some years back, we were always amazed at this truth: the most attended events were food and entertainment programs, but the ones people shared the most on social media were athletic-endurance events, runs, and races. Business and career-growth seminars came in a close second in events shared on social media. When we’re spending our time and money in hot pursuit of self-improvement, we want others to know it!

Intersections: Their Journey and Yours

The brands mentioned in these hero’s journeys have vanquished their own villains, the business killers of disengagement and distrust. And they have done much more than get people to click on a banner or watch their ads or make a one-time purchase. Their customers have fallen deeply, passionately, vocally in love with their offerings, content, and brands.

The companies that are engaging in these love affairs with their customers share a common commitment to removing resistance and inserting progress triggers along their customer-heroes’ journeys to healthier, wealthier, wiser lives. These brands help prospective customers level up these areas of their lives—whether or not they buy anything. By doing so, they have become linchpins in the journeys of Transformational Consumers.

That’s how they’ve done it. But a clear view of how your company can grow and thrive by serving Transformational Consumers can be seen only from a very particular intersection. That intersection is the spot where the Transformational Consumer’s journey intersects with another journey line: yours.