Chapter three
The Hero’s Journey of Your Transformational Consumer

There ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

—DAVID MITCHELL

It’s illuminating to think of a Transformational Consumer’s journey toward achieving any individual HWW goal as unfolding along the story line of the Hero’s Journey. In case you’re not familiar with it, the Hero’s Journey is an archetypal story model, a recurring story pattern that human beings have been telling, hearing, reading, and watching since the beginning of time.

In a Hero’s Journey, as explained by Joseph Campbell, who first identified the universality of this story line, “a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Story experts and mythologists have unpacked the universal Hero’s Journey into a long list of sequential steps and elements. (If you’d like to dive deeper, I encourage you to read Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.) For our purposes, though, the most important elements of the Hero’s Journey include

The hero (your customer)

A quest for transformation that involves a journey away from everything the hero has ever known (life, health, prosperity, or personal growth goal; aim to change from the status quo), in which the hero encounters

Enemies and villains (Resistance of all sorts)

Mentors, allies, guides, or tools (these can be lots of things, including your company, your product, your services, your content, etc.)

A battle and victory (progress of all sorts, including behavior change or completion of a goal)

The return home, as a changed being, with new skills, resources, and assets (your customers’ healthier, wealthier, wiser life and newfound momentum, confidence, and knowledge of how to change things in their lives).

This archetypal story is encoded in our collective human memory, our cells, and our neurons. Nearly every Bible story, fairy tale fable, and even most modern movies and media narratives unfold along this plotline. Jesus Christ, Luke Skywalker, Harriett Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and Erin Brockovich: these all count as heroes whose journeys we know, whether or not we love them.

Let’s take a deeper look at a few individual Transformational Consumers and their effort to pursue some of the most common HWW goals of Transformational Consumers. Watch how these journeys unfold along the same story points as the Hero’s Journey. You’ll soon begin to see how companies like yours can and do help Transformational Consumers vanquish the villain of Resistance and make progress on their quests, achieving the most important objectives of the business in the process.

Latent in your hero-customers’ journeys are all sorts of untapped possibilities for ways you can help them make progress, pointing you to opportunities for innovation, new product features, and marketing messages and campaigns. But to get that value from the journey, you must first unlimit your thinking about what’s allowed beyond the obvious, expanding your own universe of what you understand as permissible or possible ways for a company to be a mentor, ally, guide, or tool.

Note that the role of Transformer companies in these Transformational Consumers’ hero-customer quests generally aligns to the role of mentor, ally, guide, or tool. Mentors, allies, and guides tend to be service providers or content programs. They are more likely to be local businesses than tools are. In fact, if your business is your own personal services as a coach, therapist, personal trainer, financial planner, real estate broker, retreat producer, or health-care provider, you yourself might literally be your herocustomer’s mentor, ally, or guide.

Beyond the obvious, there are a couple of ways in which Transformer companies serve these roles for Transformational Consumers that are much subtler but represent most of Transformational Consumer spending and brand interactions along their HWW journeys. Apps, platforms, and even brand-published content can serve as a tool with which your herocustomers ultimately unlimits themselves into their transformed life.

The tools you can provide to help power your customer-heroes’ journeys also include supplies. The transformational journey can be uncomfortable; by definition, it involves a journey away from what’s known, a change from the status quo, a foray away from the dopamine-fueled comforts of loafing, inertia, bad habits, and salty, sugary, fatty convenience foods. It almost always involves more work than the status quo did.

An enormous portion of what Transformational Consumers are constantly on the lookout for is new, beneficial versions of the old things they used to buy—supplies for the new version of their life that they are still likely to eat or use but are more healthful, are more financially frugal or efficient or luxurious, and/or that represent or enable smarter decisions than the old versions did. Think of supplies as tools to sustain transformation: supplies that customers can bring back with them to stay on track in their newly transformed lives. This is a powerful way that consumer packaged goods, food, and apparel companies can fulfill their potential to become Transformers.

One more note: while these stories might strike you as extreme, they are actually compilations of real-life stories of Transformational Consumers from our research, online listening, and our lives.