The Transformational Consumer
Tara-Nicholle Nelson hails from Oakland near San Francisco. She is founder and CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights. She has written a new business book called The Transformational Consumer.

Tara has a Masters Degree in Psychologist and a phd from the University of California. Tara has been both lawyer and marketing director. She is the archetypal Transformational Consumer. Tara-Nicholle has also worked for Trulia, a real-estate business and is on the board of a food justice non-profit, City Slicker Farms. Tara was the first marketing director for MyFitnessPal, whose fortunes she helped transform.
Who is the Transformational Consumer?
Transformational Consumer is the most valuable and least understood customer of our time. Collectively they buy $4 trillion in life-improving products and services every year in the US.

Transformational Consumers are a massive group of people who see life as a series of projects to change their lives to become healthier, wealthier and wiser. Examples:

Eating better
Exercising more
Losing weight
Saving more money
Investing more wisely
Career development
Being a better citizen of the world

The key is to think like these transformational consumers think – very broadly.

Tara has found that 50% of the US consumers identify as transformational products, inasmuch as they are using digital or real-world products several times a week in an effort to realise their transformational healthy, wealthy or wise goals.

It is not a niche.

Tara tells us that most entrepreneurs and most people who listen to podcasts are transformational consumers. Transformational consumers are people who believe they can transform almost anything about their lives, as long as they can get a handle on tools that will help trigger progress towards the goals they are trying to accomplish.

In the world of marketing we live in there is a lot of noise. We seem to be hitting peak content. The more content that is being published right now, the less people engage with it. Yet, most marketers are spending more and more on content.
The problem of human disengagement
Tara believes marketers are falling into the broken belief that digital is the way to solve these problems. i.e. if you have an app, people will care about you, if you’ve got lots of social media followers, or you post the coolest video – that is going to solve your problems. If you just do more digital advertising that will solve the problem. BUT, Tara points out that human disengagement is a human problem.

Disengagement is not a digital problem, it is a human problem, so the solution will not be something from the digital world, it will be a human solution.

Tara believes in digital, but says it is simply a tool. It is human dreams and fears that we must solve as marketers if we want people to care about the things we create.
The hero's journey
In “The Transformational Consumer”, Tara stresses that we have to recognise that marketing is less about YOUR brand and more about the customer’s journey. Tara talks about a hero’s journey.

The hero’s journey is an archetypal story format resonates particularly well with the human brain. All the great stories follow along the hero’s journey arc. The Hero (your customer:

has a challenge or a quest to go on
receives a call to this adventure
leaves home (aka away from everything the Hero has ever known) and goes along a journey
is aided in the quest by mentors, guides, aids and tools
experiences battles, including failures and victories
returns home victorious with the bounty of their journey, literally bounty or personal changes.

Tara applies the Hero’s journey to advise brands to STOP publishing as much content ABOUT their brand, instead create their marketing and their content programming in a way that positions their customer as the Hero of their own journey.

This shifts perspective of your brand,

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