I’ve been asked several times recently: What are the demographics of the average Transformational Consumer?

My answer is this: your customers’ aspirations to live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives is a much more powerful lens for understanding what they will want, click on and buy than their age or ethnicity will ever be.

In terms of my purchase decisions and the content I engage with online, I am more like a 60-year-old white man who lives in NYC and also spins 6 times a week, eats a Paleo diet, owns his own business and travels internationally 5 times a year than I am the other 40-year-old Black women who live right here in Oakland and don’t possess the same Transformational Consumer aspirations or pursue them in the same ways.

In other words,

That said, there are Transformational Consumers in every age bracket and every demographic segment. And occasionally, there is value to looking at the spots where your audience’s healthy/wealthy/wise aspirations intersect with the common life events of a particular life stage.

Case in point: Millennials and Graduation.

There’s a reason they call the ceremony marking the end of your formal education Commencement. Graduation season is one of the most whole-life transforming times most of us ever experience. Think about all of the new everyday activities you started doing and old things you stopped within a month of the time you graduated from high school or college. Most likely, you changed:

• the place you live
• the people you spend most of your time with
• how you spend your time all day, including a new job
• opening new bank and investment accounts
• how much money you earn, save, spend and invest.

Even the things we put in, on and around our bodies change when we graduate, as we join snack-laden offices or finally have a real kitchen in which to cook. And certainly many of us get much more or much less exercise than we did. Think: desk job. Also think: can finally afford fitness studio classes.

After graduation, Millennial Transformational Consumers are out there looking for things (read: products, services, content) that can help them make these changes in a direction that results in a net healthier, wealthier and wiser life.

If your brand wants to engage Millennial graduates, there are two Transformational Truths to keep in mind. The first applies to all Transformational Consumers: the love a Transformational Consumer has for a brand is directly proportional to how much easier, less friction-ey, more beautiful or more joyous that brand makes their journey toward healthy, wealthy and wise.

The second applies specifically to Millennial Transformational Consumers: their friction detector is strong, and their tolerance for friction is low – lower than any other demographic segment.
Most Personal Disruption Campaigns or goal journeys on the way to healthy, wealthy and wise are full of sticking points and frustrations, even for a less friction-sensitive age group.

But 18-34 year-old Transformational Consumers have grown up in an era where virtually every desire can be fulfilled, in a couple of keystrokes, on demand, from their phones. In some ways, this makes the Personal Disruption Conundrum, the life limiting factor of hard-to-make behavior changes, even harder for this group.

Within this challenge lies a grand opportunity for brands to serve and engage this group by removing those frictions, sweepingly. Surgically. If you can deliver friction-removing products and content that change Millennial Transformational Consumers’ behavior for the healthier, wealthier or wiser? It will likely work for everyone: for consumers of every age bracket, and for consumers of every degree of transformational inclination.

Take Acorns. Acorns is a mobile investment app that has driven remarkable adoption among the most “unbanked” generation of our time. Fortune wrote: “Over the past year and a half, Acorns has opened 850,000 investment accounts, 75% of which were created by savers under 35 years of age.”

These numbers are impressive when you think of the desireablility of the 18 to 34 segment to every industry. But they are extraordinary in the context of the unprecedentedly troubled relationship between this generation and personal finance:

• All 4 of the leading Banks are among the ten least loved brands by Millennials.
• 71% would rather go to the dentist than listen to what banks are saying.
• 1 in 3 are open to switching banks in the next 90 days.

Source: Millennial Disruption Index

On Acorns, young people open their phones, open an account, enter their credit card information: all things they are well accustomed to doing. Then, on every purchase, Acorns rounds up the purchase amount and invests the difference in the user’s choice of a set of diversified Vanguard portfolios. Users can start investing with as little as $5. The company charges a small monthly fee on active accounts.

CEO Noah Kerner told TechCrunch that with Acorns, “young people can keep growing their account in small amounts through lots of different sources,” adding that “with micro-investing, anyone can start growing wealth.”

BudgetsAreSexy gave Acorns a rave review, citing the fun of seeing those loose change investments add up, the beauty of the automatic/effortless extra investment and pointing out that “[i]t’s also the very first app to let you create an investment account straight off your phone too. Not that we’re *that* lazy that it’s necessary, haha, but still.”

If reaching and engaging Transformational Consumers in the Millennial age range is a priority for your company, your teams should be asking these questions:

• What is your Millennial Transformational Consumer’s Journey look like? The journey of solving the transformation problem your company exists to solve?
• Where are their sticking points, quit points and frictions?
• What can you do remove those frictions, with products, services, features or content?