CHAPTER FOUR
Your Call to Adventure

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

—DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS

If you read business media at all, you are undoubtedly aware of the “list” awards and honors phenomenon: 100 Fastest Growing Companies, 75 Best Places to Work, Top 30 Executives under 30, and so forth.

One of these awards lists stands out among the rest: Fast Company magazine’s Most Innovative Companies (MIC) list. This particular list is unique in that you can’t apply to it. You can’t game it. There’s a real secret sauce to how it’s put together. Everyone reads it. Some of the big guys make the list every year, like the FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google). But they always make it for a kind of surprising reason or for a product line outside their core business that you don’t really hear much about.

Every year, many companies make it to the list that you might never have heard of before. But you will definitely hear about them time and time again, once they hit the list.

MIC companies hold the cachet of having been officially deemed Fast Companies, with the paradoxical imprimatur of uber-cool innovation coming out of fundamentally solid businesses. These companies are on the offense. They are winners.

The list is so respected and well read, at least in part, because the Fast Company editors and writers are some of the best business storytellers in the world. They have mastered the art of telling business stories, of telling the stories of the MIC companies, in a few different versions that differ in emphasis but all follow the Hero’s-Journey model:

Version 1—The Customer Journey. Millions of customers have an intractable problem. Leader of MIC Company has an insight into that problem and sets out on a mission to solve it. Leader and MIC Company create innovative solution. Millions of customers buy/ use/love it.

Version 2—The Industry Journey. Sector was dying, customers were fleeing or turning away. Leader of MIC Company starts using tool or strategy that has never been applied to this industry. Leader and MIC Company create innovative new offering(s). Millions of customers buy/use/love it.

Version 3—The Company Journey. Company was floundering, failing, or even succeeding but in a “more of the same old” way. Leader of MIC Company has an insight about customer wants and needs and makes a surprising investment in company resources in something other than the core business. New offering(s) soar. Millions of customers buy/use/love it.

In every version of these MIC stories, the editors and writers generally configure their lengthier pieces to feature at least one company leader who was the champion of the changes that had to be made in order to get on the list. There is at least one leader, but often several, who played the hero’s role in the transformational journey.

My question for you is this: are you willing to be that leader, to play that role, in your company?

Remember Why We’re Here

Let’s not forget why we’re having this conversation in the first place. The whole reason we’re here is that many of our companies are struggling with customer and employee disengagement, and that is severely limiting our ability to connect with customers and grow our businesses. We’re not sure what they’ll respond to and what they’ll roll their eyes at.

We’re having this conversation because another way is possible. A way of connection, customer engagement, employee engagement, and even love. To get there, we have to solve some concrete business problems that can be solved only by understanding our customers, strategically and systematically.

We know that if we engage our customers and our employees over and over again, we will succeed. Our companies will perform and soar. But it’s unclear how to do that. We need direction and clarity. And then we’ll need to change how we do what we do, to move in that direction, once we get it.

We have to be able to spot opportunities for innovating things our customers will love, buy, and use. We have to find junctures in their journeys for reconnection, for engaging them, and for developing loyalty, repeat business, and word-of-mouth referrals. And we have to know enough of the right things about them to lay the foundation for building beloved digital strategies, content programs, and brands: to transcend the transactional.

The Transformational Consumer Insights framework sketches out the landscape of human motivations on which we, as leaders, can begin to rebuild trust and engagement with our employees and our customers. But that’s just the landscape, the context.

Now is where we take a beat and acknowledge one thing: that the modus operandi that got us here won’t get us there. If we want to move beyond transactional relationships with our customers, we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. How much change we’ll need to make is very case specific. For one company, there might need to be just some small but important “power tweaks” to our marketing messages. Another company may need to reorient almost every area of the business.

But in any event, unlocking growth and engagement by systematically harnessing the force of human transformation is a journey of its own. Consider the rest of this book as your personal guidebook for that journey.

The first stage of that journey is to rethink what you actually sell. In this stage, you’ll be inspired to move out of that tired, old transactional belief system that you sell a product and into the inspired position that what you sell is a particular flavor and format of transformation.

The next stage of your company’s journey to transcendence is to rethink your customer, redefining whom you serve through the lens of their journey and doing the research of actually talking and, more importantly, listening to real-life humans in your audience to create a set of key insights about their journey.

You will find this stage particularly powerful for reactivating checkedout employees. Have no fear—this stage does not necessarily require you to scrap your whole product line. After diving deep into your customers’ journey, you will probably have some thoughts about product and service innovations. But you’ll certainly be thinking about how to engineer an internal, whole-company mindset reset, as described by the Deloitte corporate learning adviser Josh Bersin:

How do you create purpose, mission, and soul? Pharmaceutical companies are redefining themselves as wellness companies; retailers are redefining themselves as places for healthy food; tech companies define themselves as businesses to help people obtain information; and the list goes on. When you offer people a mission and purpose greater than financial return, you attract passionate individuals who want to contribute. And that brings a level of commitment and engagement no compensation package can create. ¹

The next several stages will require you to rethink your marketing, your metrics, and how you conceive of the competition. All of these stages help you translate your Transformational Consumer audience’s real-life journeys into the elusive results we’ve already seen most companies so desperately lacking: customer engagement, loyalty, and love.

This point is critical: serving Transformational Consumers is not just about capturing more of a share of their wallets. It’s about capturing a place in their hearts and their minds, which shows up in dozens of different, business-critical, quantifiable ways under a single header: engagement.

Think about this: the average person makes between 200 and 300 foodrelated decisions a day. ² That’s 300 moments related to food. The same goes for money-related decisions, career decisions, decisions about how people spend their time and their lives, small and large: thousands of decisions, all told, every day.

Using food as an example, it’s obvious that no one buys food 300 times a day. But we think about food, choose something to eat, choose not to eat something, prepare food, go to the market, Google a recipe, pass up a food truck, grab a snack, make the kids a snack, order something on Instacart, make a dinner date, and the like 300 times every day.

And many of those 300 times will involve some level of contact with some brand, for better or for worse. Maybe it’s making a reservation for a dinner a week out. Maybe it’s as simple as reading a label or ripping into a food wrapper. Maybe it’s reaching into the bag to put the groceries away or walking past a sign. Maybe it’s reading a blog post or social media post online.

Every one of those times is not an opportunity to sell them something.

But many of those 300 daily food decisions do represent opportunities to connect and engage with that customer around food.

These nonspending engagements could go one of three ways: they could generate nothing, indifference. They could generate hate and disgust, such as the outrage that readers spewed at the brands in the New York Times article about the addictiveness of Cheetos. ³ Or they could generate love and respect and loyalty and word of mouth. The rest of this book is devoted to how to make this third scenario come to life for your company.

The most important tool you’ll need is a team that is firing on all cylinders, engaged and in alignment with your new, transcendent vision, mission, and initiatives. The last stage of your journey involves rethinking your team to reorient them and poise them for this collective journey.

Your Call to Adventure

As with every good adventure story, the story of the Transformational Consumer has a plot twist. Like one of those films made up of vignettes with one or two intersecting characters or story lines, your CustomerHero’s Journey intersects with another fascinating story line: your journey as leader-hero.

There’s an essential element of the hero’s journey that I (intentionally) omitted to mention in chapter 3: the call to adventure. I didn’t mention it explicitly up until now because everything you’ve read so far has, in fact, been a part of your own call to adventure.

Visualize yourself, right now, as you read this, as taking the first steps on a hero’s journey of your own. Maybe the object of your quest is simply for your company to grow and thrive in any market climate. Or maybe your quest is actually a journey to self-actualization, to fulfilling your deepest purpose, to using your everyday work as a way to impact the world and solve the problems you desperately believe shouldn’t plague the people you serve.

This is your call to the adventure of serving as the voice of the customer within your company, regardless of your title, regardless of your role. Whether you are the CEO of a public company, the sole proprietor of a local business, or a marketing director stuck in the middle level of a scaling start-up, hear me when I say that you can be a leader-hero, just like the ones featured in the MIC list.

If you are not (yet) an executive, I urge you to charge ahead anyway, keeping in mind that all transformation in companies happens from the inside out. Becoming one of several leader-heroes in the companies I’ve worked with was pivotal in honing my own purpose-driven, strategic voice and ultimately leveling up my career. Boldly taking up the mantle of reactivating and engaging customers through the lens of their HWW Aspirations was how I achieved the business results and developed the strategic voice, ultimately, that earned me a seat at the leadership table.

Consider yourself called.

And know, leader-hero, that where this journey, your journey, intersects with your Customer-Hero’s Journey is where beloved businesses are built. Where brand love is born. Where products are innovated that change customers’ behavior and bodies and bank accounts and even their businesses, for the better. Where content is created that people read and watch and love, because it changes people’s lives for the better.

This is where businesses are tweaked and transformed in a way that takes the limits off what’s possible for your career and your impact, your team, your company, and definitely your customer.

At the end of “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” Moss tells the story of the executive Jeffrey Dunn. Dunn’s career path took him from running billions worth of Coke’s North America business to using junk-food marketing strategies to sell carrots as the president and CEO of Bolthouse Farms (which has since been acquired by Campbell’s).

Moss writes that when Dunn was called to brief Bolthouse investors on his plan for marketing carrots,

“We act like a snack, not a vegetable,” he told the investors. “We exploit the rules of junk food to fuel the baby-carrot conversation. We are projunk-food behavior but anti-junk-food establishment.”

The investors were thinking only about sales. They had already bought one of the two biggest farm producers of baby carrots in the country, and they’d hired Dunn to run the whole operation. Now, after his pitch, they were relieved. Dunn had figured out that using the industry’s own marketing ploys would work better than anything else. He drew from the bag of tricks that he mastered in his 20 years at Coca-Cola, where he learned one of the most critical rules in processed food: The selling of food matters as much as the food itself.

As good business folk do, Dunn was also thinking of success. But, according to Moss, he was motivated by a desire to pay the world back for the harm he’d done by pushing sugary soda for years and years. Moss writes, “in his new line of work, Dunn told me he was doing penance for his CocaCola years. ‘I’m paying my karmic debt,’ he said.” ⁴

The other moral of Dunn’s story is that you should not be daunted if you’re not the head of R&D or the CEO or if you work in marketing or in HR or PR for that matter. When you decide to go into the business of behavior change, everything matters, not just the product. How you think about what you sell, how you market it, your understanding of customers and competition, and even your internal company culture: these, too, matter as much as the product itself.

These things might even matter more.

What got you here won’t get you there. Rethinking things—rethinking everything—will.