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

by Tara-Nicholle Nelson

The Transformational ConsumerThey 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 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.

Genres: Business

304 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2017

Reviews

[Ronald J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is basically a love letter to a customer you haven’t met yet—the future version of them. Nelson’s big idea is simple and true: people don’t buy products, they buy progress. They want to be healthier, wealthier, wiser—and they reward the firms that help them get there with devotion, repeats, and referrals. In other words: stop pitching features and start facilitating change.

I liked the premise because it’s the Transformation Economy wearing marketing clothes. The best sections are where she talks like a human (not a funnel), insisting that the real advantage comes from respecting the “human motivation—transformation” underneath the purchase.

Why not 5 stars? A few riffs feel… over-seeded (to borrow her own farming metaphor). She knows transactional is a “hard row to hoe… incessantly seeded,” and sometimes the prose proves it. Trim 15–20% and it becomes a sharper instrument.

Still: if your firm is trying to move from selling work to changing lives, this is a useful mirror and a good contribution to the emerging and embryonic Transformation Economy literature. Be sure to check out Joe Pine's forthcoming book (Feb 3, 2026, The Transformation Economy.

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good examples about the evolution of brand into something that transforms its consumers' lives for the better.

- Focus on problems the consumer is having rather than on competition.
- Understand your consumer's Hero's Journey (journey mapping).

This is a must do for new entrant brands and slightly less so for incumbent. If you are already a marketing/strategy/consultant, these ideas are not entirely new or original. If you are not, there's much to be enjoyed especially if you are more old school.