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?

Today is my 40th birthday. I am informed and aware that this occasion causes no shortage of wailing and gnashing of teeth for some. I, however, am delighted, ecstatic, expansive, grateful, excited.

It helps that I’m writing this from Maui.

But it also helps that I’ve been desperate to be a 40-year-old woman since I was nine years old.

When I was nine, my family owned a racquet club, where I would hang out and help out in the summertime. Watching those 40-year-old women Jane Fonda-it-up in the dance aerobics classes, decked in thong leotards, leg warmers and white high-top Reeboks was everything to me. It, as they say, gave me life.

That my social calendar now consists largely of dance classes and brunches, spin classes and dinners (which my friend Rebecca and I do so regularly we have given it a name: spinner) and lululemon-clad global adventures with my fitness pals wherein we cycle, row, swim and shop – this feels like a mission: accomplished kind of life.

So much of my life right now reflects the best parts of what I’d dreamed, but is more beautiful than I ever legitimately hoped for. At 40, I have the groundedness, humility and good sense to sit in and appreciate these moments, even as I gear up for transitions and new seasons. I have a beautiful home, friends and community like I’d never known were even possible, a career that allows me to be creative, true to myself and flex my smarts, and the truest type of prosperity. Beyond just the financial, I live an abundant, healthy life I love to look at – and love to live.

Is life perfect? Definitely not. But it is beautiful. And it was hard won, by the grace of the Good Lord, the sweat of my brow and the constant inner inspiration and willingness to push beyond what was comfortable. Twenty years back I was a very young Mom, trying to get my education and raise my son and his brother the best I could. New friends might never know it, but my last couple of decades included two divorces, near bankruptcy in the Not-So-Great-Recession and a custody drama.

They included trying to consciously parent a very troubled teen, the heartbreak of my brother going to prison, and a series of multi-generational health scares, from my son’s congenital glaucoma to my mother’s stroke after stroke after stroke. The last decade also included a weird and wondrous journey of serial career transitions and reinventions, spiritual and emotional healing, financial recovery (and then some) and the restoration of many of the broken areas of my life.

So at 40, I sit at a place of calm, sweet, surrender to this journey. I am intense, intent and intentional, and I am a woman of great energy, power and activity. But I allow now, in a way I couldn’t even conceive at 20. I still have another 80 or so years to live, conservatively, and I can already see how the dots have connected, taking even the most traumatic of experiences which could have harmed me – the very things which I thought would do me in – and turning them, ultimately to my great advantage.

Those traumas are often the little kernels of miracle at the core of my superpowers, I’ve learned. I’ve learned that so many of the things I forced to happen, historically, were a mess, and that so many of the things I allowed to happen turned out to be the best things ever. Now, I allow.

I am, by nature, a contrarian. I have cultivated an uncanny ability to rethink and reframe a painful or stressful belief into new beliefs that work better for me. So, a few years back, when my friends started to turn 40, I noticed how many were having a hard time with it. To be clear, I believe that experience is valid, especially here in the US. Our cultural narrative about aging is jacked, and people – men and women alike – struggle mightily to escape it’s maw.

But, maybe because of my Jane Fonda-esque childhood models, maybe because of my contrarian nature, I had hit 35 and decided that 40 and beyond was going to be stellar, not in some weird chasing youth kind of way, but in the way of depth, maturity, energy, wellness and grounded calm. And also in the way of no longer being so focused on everyday dramas and emergencies as I was in my 20s.

Starting right around the time I turned 35, watching people turn 40 with stress and angst inspired me, as did the realization that time flies, and I’d be hitting the milestone myself before long. I recall very clearly thinking: they’re not doing it right. And I recall asking myself the next natural question: what would turning 40 “right” look like?

So, I got still and quiet and took stock. I realized that a lot was wonderful about my life, and the person who I was, but also that the greatness I could have and be and live was being limited by a few bad habits, limiting beliefs, dysfunctional patterns, and toxic relationships. I stopped distracting myself from looking deep at my past and my present, and made a conscious decision to press pause, do some deep cleaning and healing of my life, and do whatever it took to release the self-critique and anxiety that had been an ever-present backdrop to my existence up till that time. I agreed with myself to then do the work it’d take to stop creating and re-creating the same dramas and tired, old, played-out broken life storylines again and again.

I went to therapy, and participated in treatment for post-traumatic stresses I didn’t know were called that. I read so many self-help books, and practiced what I learned. I got grounded and comfortable with the discomfort of exploring myself and getting real about my messes. I learned that neurons that fire together wire together, and began the process of rewiring some old emotions and behaviors.

My therapist told me that it was never too late to have a wonderful childhood, so I took up the challenge of injecting a sense of light, play, joy and wonder into my daily life, all the while cultivating the skill of putting an end to relationships and patterns that no longer served me.

I realized that I’d really never – not even as a kid – had legitimate birthday celebrations, and that I’d have to make up for lost time with my 40th. Ultimately, I engineered the birthday celebration I’m in the midst of right now: an 18-month birthday, the cornerstone of which would be a series of 9 trips to places around the world I’d never seen before. I’d have to start at age 39 and end at age 41, but I was up for the challenge.

So, in June I went to Paris and Copenhagen, in September to Italy and Croatia. I’m spending my actual birthday with friends in Maui, and have another half dozen trips plotted to take place between New Year’s and 2016.

But back to 35. I started doing the work, and ultimately made a series of changes to my life that systematically, fundamentally changed everything. I got divorced. I changed jobs a couple of times. My relationship with my parents shifted and evolved to a new stage of maturity and health. I got out of debt and my finances flourished. I made besties with my body, which I’d struggled with for decades, and it responded with a next-level state of energy and health.

I started walking the way of integrity, recognizing the sense of tightness and constriction that nearly always signals that I’m acting or living or speaking something different than what i truly feel. I learned how to align and realign my words and deeds with truth. I did that over and over again, with less and less effort required each time.

I unrepressed myself, rewiring what I believe about the world, and about myself, to align with what God says about me: that I am His child, that my whole job here is to let my light shine and to love Him, others and myself. In the process, under my touchiness and (then) easy-to-pull triggers, I found a deep reservoir of love, enthusiasm and near boundless energy for life.

My son recently showed me a picture of myself from college, and I had the crazy realization that at 40, I look and feel so much better, so much more joyful, and even so much more physically well than I did then. While I appreciate those who joke about my looking like I’m my son’s sister, the work of getting to this state of life was so healing and so formative to who I am, that I actually have been shouting my age from the rooftops this last few months.

In fact, when people suggest I look 21 what I think is this: thanks, but you could not pay me to be 21 again. You could’nt pay me to go back to the self-consciousness and angst I had before I learned to trust myself, before I starting unfolding into the full glory of being me, flaws and all. No, thank you. And come on, if you’re 30, 40, 50 or even 70 – admit it: we all know we’re glad to be done with that nonsense. Seriously, if you’ve been gifted with great health and you make a practice of cultivating that with a healthy lifestyle, you can be beautiful in a new and different way, and active at a new level by the time you’re 40. I’m pleased as punch that I can wear all the activewear I want, and do whatever activities I want, without worrying about whether I look weird in dance class or whether I can afford the yoga workshop or cycling adventure. This, I could not do at 21.

Over 40, if you do it right (and you can), new possibilities open up. You know how to work your body. You know what to eat to feel good, and what doesn’t work for you. You can be more beautiful and vibrant and fit than ever, and understand that that beauty includes your body’s little endurance trophies, like stretch marks, foot pain and surgery scars. You have some money, and hopefully little or no debt. You have clarity on what you’re great at, or at least know that you can do something to get it. You know what clothes look great on you, and can afford them. You know that life is beautiful, and that every beautiful moment will pass. But so will the tough stuff.

You no longer feel so entitled to smooth sailing through life, so you’re less outraged and resistant to the reality that sad, hard things happen. You’re more confident in your ability to handle what comes your way, and you are no longer so quick to see things as “bad” or “good”. Rather you see events as just life and people as wounded, beautiful children of God. You stop taking things personally. No, really – even the most personally directed assaults.

You realize that life is precious, and that people matter. You can get out of your head, and into the game of living your life

Well, that’s what 40 represents for me.

I’m inspired today by something President Obama said in an interview I read a few months back, while I was on the first leg of my birthday trip, somewhere in France. In the aftermath of the Charleston shootings, he was talking about American race relations as an ongoing social evolution. He said that, as President, you can never really solve an entire social issue of that scale – just imagine: we live nearly 200 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and are still wrestling with these same issues. As he sees it, Obama said, his job isn’t to write the whole book of history on any given issue. All he gets is one paragraph in the book. And all he can do is everything possible to get his paragraph right.

I can think of no better perspective to take, as I commemorate moving into my fourth decade on this earth, than this. The last three decades were focused on growing into myself, understanding myself, my power, other people and the world, healing from the inevitable wounds of life and building the capacity and resources to live a life of joy, love, power and integrity.

It’s become clear to me that the next eight decades, give or take, will be focused on boldly doing what it takes to get my paragraph right, in terms of how I impact and experience the people in my life, in my communities and in the world. I hope you’ll come along for the adventure.

So much love + onward + upward,

T

This post originally appeared on Tara’s blog at taranicholle.com – sign up here for her newsletter. Follow Tara on Facebook and on Twitter @taranicholle.

Change is the new black.

And the data shows that everyday people, now more than ever, are actually acting on their internal imperative to change themselves and their lives – in a way that is gaining momentum against the age-old, utterly human tendency to crave change, yet stay inert:

• We’re rethinking work: For three months running, the government-reported rates of people quitting their jobs has outpaced the rate of those getting laid off, a sky-high “Shove-it Indicator” rate for a job market still plagued by high unemployment . This baffles analysts who expected this to be a one-time anomaly when it first happened in February of this year. The days of the 30-year job are gone, and over a third of the workforce is comprised of freelancers, part-timers, consultants and contractors.

• We’re rethinking home: Home ownership rates are at a 15 year low, despite the fact that home values seem to be recovering and mortgage rates are at rock-bottom lows. And home ownership rates are down 12.5 percent in Americans under 35 – more than in any other age group – which doesn’t overlap with those who lost homes to foreclosure. Those who can afford to buy remember the recent foreclosure fallout and are cautious with their timing and spending, if and when they do get off the fence.

• We’re rethinking health: Consumers are taking their health into their own hands. PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that at today’s pace, consumers will spend $14 billion on mobile health apps, video games and resources that rate medical care providers in 2014. To boot, health and fitness measures that were once perceived as extreme have gone mainstream: 13 million Americans completed road races (5Ks, 10Ks, Half-Marathons and Marathons) in 2010 – an all-time record, and a 10% increase over the previous year.

In past generations, aspirations were largely out-of-reach, largely material dreams: A sum certain in the bank. A house in that neighborhood. To hit that particular number on the scale. Many people held the same exact aspirations, in fact, to wit: The American Dream. These were one-and-done dreams, bucket list dreams: you could reach them, check them off, retire and die.

But Boomers’ children? There’s a large segment of us who identify ourselves as life hackers, wellness-and-wealth tinkerers, lifestyle design enthusiasts by nature. The craving for transformation is constant, or at least recurring: it is a way of life. We want to experience and be, versus get: we want to be marathoners and yoginis, be entrepreneurs and be world travelers – not just take a trip around the world.

And – here’s the rub for entrepreneurs and businesses – we fall in love with the brands and technologies and gadgets and personalities (often CEOs, innovators and self-taught experts) that put a stake in the ground and deliver ongoing resources that:

• power our aspirations
• help us reach our goals and change our habits, and
• fuel the ongoing transformations we want in our lives, our careers, our health and our finances –
• and help us do all of the above more efficiently, stylishly, enjoyably, effectively (or with less friction, backsliding and pain) than we could otherwise or with previous generations of products or services.

We don’t just try or buy these brands, products and services. We fall deeply in love with them – having an emotional relationship with them that far exceeds what makes sense based strictly on the utility of the product to our lives.

• We buy them over and over again, in large quantities.
• We Tweet @ and about them, we ridicule our Facebook friends who aren’t using them, we blog or post links about them, and we ‘share’ their product page links with our social networks.
• We read their blogs, wait for their newsletters, watch their videos and comment – we go practice yoga in the streets with them and put our names in lotteries to score tickets to their events.

Non-conformity does not equal anti-consumerism.

I submit that this change-craving segment of the marketplace is a legitimate consumer group: the Transformational Consumer. I also submit that understanding users through the lens of their change-based aspirations equips businesses to better engage and serve them. So maybe the best starting point for exploring this Transformational Consumer group is through the pattern of these aspirations, the common interests and ‘investments’ they are making in improving themselves and their lives:

• Health, Fitness and Mind-Body Wellness. This include health clubs and foods (quinoa, anyone?), supplements and recreational sports/wellness activities like, yoga, running, Crossfit, TRX and all the gear that goes along with them. It also includes things like digital health and wellness apps and games, spas, weight management programs, and infomercial fitness videos.

• Personal Finance. This includes money education and apps, personal finance software, financial and estate planning services – possibly even some real estate, mortgage, banking and investment transactions.

• Self Management and Behavior Change. This includes all the efforts and investments involved in changing our habits and behaviors, setting and further goals, recovery and reinvention, and managing our own emotions and mindsets, as through therapies and some self-help type books.
  • Personal and Professional Development. Coaching, books, seminars, online educational courses and other workshops for skill-building and upleveling our performance or enjoyment of life – especially in the realm of ‘how-to’ materials, career development and entrepreneurship.
  • Natural and High-Performance Living. Investments in what is put in, on and around their bodies (and those of their kids and pets) – as well as the actual physical spaces in which they live. This includes organic and whole foods, but also spends for green home remodels, natural home and body products and both high- and low-tech organizational and personal electronics for home and lifestyle.

In my quest to build this new way of understanding consumers via the lens of their craving to create change in their own lives and to understand where the edges of this Transformational Consumer group start and end or overlap with other consumer groups, I recently attended the LOHAS Forum, an annual meeting of companies that have long served the ‘Deep Green’ consumer, those engaged in what they call Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability.

It struck me that virtually all LOHAS consumers are Transformational Consumers – but not all Transformational Consumers are LOHAS consumers.  (Transformational Consumers are probably a much lighter, somewhat less altruistic shade of green.) But get this: the Natural Marketing Institute tallies the LOHAS marketplace as covering $290 Billion in annual spending on personal health, natural lifestyles, green building, eco-tourism and alternative modes of energy and transportation, and estimates that this number has a 10-15 percent annual growth rate.

This dollar amount, then, would seem like just the starting point for quantifying the spending power and market opportunity presented by the Transformational Consumer sector.

Transformational Consumers vote for lifestyle design with their dollars. They may eschew overly ostentatious consumer luxury goods, but will actually overspend on high-end, high-performance natural cosmetic, food, sports, autos and tech products – for themselves, their homes, their children and even their pets.  They will spend more on wearable fitness trackers and online entrepreneurship courses than on a logo handbag – unless, that is, the logo is lululemon’s.

I’m not saying that these values are good or bad, or that they are better or worse than the priorities of any other consumer group or generation. Rather, I am pointing out that there is an unrecognized consumer segment – the Transformational Consumer – that industries and innovators can better understand and engage via their singular desire to constantly uplevel and create change in their lives, careers, health and personal finances, rather than by their demographics or even other sophisticated psychographic segmentation approaches, e.g., Alpha Moms, Succeeders, etc.

I’m also pointing out that this is a consumer segment with billions in spending power and evangelistic largesse to deploy with the brands that authentically connect with them around these aspirations.

The rethink is on. And the Transformational Consumer revolution will be televised. But it will also be experienced, streamed, time-shifted, watched and researched on 3 or 4 screens at a time, worn, tasted, smelled, blogged about, tracked, quantified, liked, shared, tweeted, rated, ranted about and reviewed.

So, Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Marketers: what, if anything, are you doing for the Transformational Consumer? And perhaps more importantly, is your company a Transformational Business?

This article was written by Tara-Nicholle Nelson and originally appeared on Forbes on 7/9/2012

Historically, marketing was something companies did to drive growth – to get new people to buy what they sold. These days, the more we understand what it takes to make a business thrive, and the more digital companies play a role in the marketplace, the more we see a shift to marketers being called upon to engage existing users (vs. just getting new ones).

Engagement marketing didn’t really used to be a thing. What we used to hear about in that vein was “life cycle” campaigns: messages you would deliver to customers based on where they were in their “life cycle” of using your product. So, if a customer had been using an app for a few months, they would get a “drip” email message with different content than someone who had been using it for just a week or two.