Introduction
How to Transcend the Transactional

Advertisements are so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnifi cence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

—SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1759

Have you ever started up your car and had the warning bell start going off , but it wasn’t obvious what was making it ring? You open and shut the doors, check to make sure everyone’s seat belts are on, slam the trunk a couple of times, and still it dings. Only after you give up and realize you’re driving against resis tance do you realize that your parking brake is on. Unclick it, and you’re off.

That’s what I see happening with entrepreneurs and executives in every size of business, in every sector, around the world.

I talk with these people every day for a living. There are three things they say they’re most stressed about:

1. Growing the business (Growth)

2. Beating the competition (Winning)

3. Posting the right “content” to the right social media channel at the right time (Content)

While the first two of these are worthy objectives, the levers that most executives and entrepreneurs try to pull in order to achieve them are, like slamming the trunk, barking up the wrong tree. The number-one limiting factor of almost every business is neither growth nor the competition. It is disengagement. It has been since at least 1759. More on that in just a bit.

The third question is a beast of its own. “What should we do on social media?” sucks up a stunningly disproportionate amount of time and energy at the highest levels of almost every company I meet for such a tactical issue.

These are the wrong questions. We’re having the wrong conversations. Here’s how I know.

I was the VP of marketing for the world’s largest digital health company. The company was called MyFitnessPal. Our logo was a little orange dancer. We called her “tiny dancer.” She was clip art, from a time when the founder built the app in a back room, just he and his cat.

Yet, with these brand assets, the founder grew that company to have 45 million users, over eight years. Then we grew from 45 million to over 100 million users in 18 months. We started a blog with zero readers that had ten million uniques a month less than ten months later.

And we did it with zero paid advertising.

How?

We paid attention to the humanity of the people we served. We paid attention to how they wanted their lives to be different and how we could help them achieve that. This deep, human motivation— transformation—is one of the most elemental reasons people do the things they do. The drive for their lives to be diff erent and better than they are right now is the pure, primal force underlying nearly every purchase decision and brand interaction people make.

In particular, there are three ways in which people have wanted their lives to be different throughout human history. And each of these involves a set of behavior changes that are extraordinarily difficult for people to make.

They want to be healthier.

They want to be wealthier.

They want to be wiser.

Those of us who have taken on business as our life’s work must now elevate our thinking. We must dare to be different. Let’s stop fixating on which pic to post on which channel. Instead, dedicate yourself and your company to the endeavor of becoming an agent and facilitator of the transformations that people want to make in their lives.

That’s what we did at MyFitnessPal. Our business model, our product, our marketing, even our internal culture—everything about the company was devoted to helping our customers change their behavior to make progress on their transformational journeys.

That’s how we achieved greatness. Even with an orange dancer logo. Even with the word “pal” in our brand name.

This might sound like it’s difficult to do if your company sells soap or paper products. It might sound impossible if your company has sold drugs or home-improvement supplies for 100 years. This might sound really hard if your business model is B2B enterprise software or retail or grocery or even apparel.

Trust me when I say that it can be done. And if you choose to take on this challenge, which this book explains how to do, you can opt out of the disengagement epidemic and transcend the transactional nature of your company’s relationships with customers.