Obsess Over Your Customers, Not Your Rivals
–Harvard Business Review

The starting point of most competitive analysis is a question: Who is your competition? That’s because most companies view their competition as another brand, product, or service. But smart leaders and organizations go broader.

The question is not who your competition is but what it is. And the answer is this: Your competition is any and every obstacle your customers encounter along their journeys to solving the human, high-level problems your company exists to solve.

When I led marketing at MyFitnessPal and was asked about our competition, I think people always expected me to rattle off a list of other nutrition-tracking smartphone apps and weight-loss programs.

What I actually said was that we were on a mission to make it easier to live a healthy life than an unhealthy one. So our chief competition was anything that makes it harder to live a healthy life. This included biology (fat tastes good, sugar is delicious, and our brains are wired to want more of both); mindless eating; and the billion-dollar advertising and marketing budgets of companies that make fast food, junk food, and processed food. Our competition was the fact that in many situations healthy food is actually more expensive and less convenient than unhealthy food is.

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Episode #163: How to Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair With Your Customers
–Read to Lead Podcast

According to today’s guest, as brands “we must dedicate ourselves to becoming a facilitator of the transformations people want to make in their lives.”

The reason, according to Tara-Nicholle Nelson, is because of the number-one factor limiting your company’s success. Disengagement.

She dives into this and more in her new book, The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair With Your Customers By Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser.

In it, she reveals a Transformational Consumer Framework to help you elevate how you think about everything: your customer, what you sell, your marketing, the competition, and your team.

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EPISODE #1312 Tara-Nicholle nelson: The Transformational Consumer
–33voices

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Ep. 34 | Tara-Nicholle Nelson on Helping Customers Along Their Journey
–Helping Sales Radio by Service Rocket

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EDITOR’S CHOICE: The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with Your Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser
–800-CEO-READ

We’ve reviewed a lot of books over the years about engaging employees in a larger purpose, how to call on deeper human motivations than a paycheck or profit to inspire more effortful, intentional, and influential work. Most companies simply find it harder to create an environment in which an employee can optimally contribute all they have to offer than it is to create a product for customers to easily consume.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson ups the ante in her new book, The Transformational Consumer, arguing that we should be engaging our customers in a higher purpose, to help them be more effortful and intentional in how they live their lives, to call on their aspirations rather than their addictions. Luckily, that desire already exists; we just have to be willing to meet it.

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How to Transcend the Transactional: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with Your Customers and Employees
–Change This

“This deep, human motivation—transformation—is one of the most elemental reasons people do the things they do. And it’s certainly the pure, primal force underlying why they buy what they buy, read what they read and love what they love.

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, without help.

They want to be healthier

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Marketing to the “Transformational Consumer”
–MarketingSherpa

Three commitments to shift from a product-first to problem-first worldview

“The MarketingSherpa study surfaces the incredible opportunity for the companies that are willing to shift from what I call a ‘product-first’ worldview to ‘problem-first.’ This requires three commitments,” said Tara-Nicholle Nelson, CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights (TCI) and author of The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier and Wiser.

According to Nelson, those three commitments are:

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I’ve completed hundreds of 30-day challenges — here’s what I’ve learned
–Business Insider

I’ve done maybe upwards of a hundred Challenges over the years. It started with health and fitness, way back in the day.

My friend and I would meal prep in our little cottages, and we’d challenge ourselves to eat clean all week, until cheat day. I did a Whole30 that snowballed into a Whole90.

One time, my trainer issued—and I accepted—the challenge of doing 10,000 kettlebell swings in a month.

Trust me when I say that my derrière has never been the same.

Before I go too far into why I find Challenges to be so shift-sparking and growth provoking, and the growth I’ve seen in my life in the course of taking on Challenges, we need to agree on some things.

Or one thing. Namely, what I mean by “challenges.”

I’m not talking generically about things that are a little hard to do, or a lot hard, though I like them, too.

When I use the word challenges with a capital C, I’m talking about something very particular:

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The [Adjective] [Number] Things You Need to Know About Clickbait
–First Round

While running the real estate blog for Trulia, then-marketing manager Tara-Nicholle Nelson got a surprising email. A woman wrote in to tell her that a Trulia blog post saved her marriage. It wasn’t about the perfect combo of beds and bathrooms or whether to buy a Craftsman or a Colonial. It instead outlined the variables that make up one’s vision of a home — a proxy for how buyers wanted to live after they bought a home. The article’s title clearly defined what would follow after the click — and delivered. Having found the advice, the woman and her partner changed the tenor of their conversation. They stopped quibbling about specific properties and started talking about how they wanted to live together. That’s the impact that actionable content paired with faithful headlines can have. Under Nelson’s watch, the blog’s readership grew to 11 million regular readers. Since, Nelson has become an expert in building branded content that can reach customers and improve their lives.

After Trulia, Nelson was the VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, where she more than doubled users to 100 million, drove a 25% increase in user engagement and oversaw the eventual $475 million acquisition by Under Armour. She then became VP of Marketing at Under Armour Connected Fitness, where she oversaw growth, engagement, content marketing and user insights. Nelson now consults on these topics and has written The Transformational Consumer, a book about building brands and customer engagement by tapping into the human aspiration for a better life.

Here, Nelson talks about how to combat clickbait and create real engagement through content. She outlines the top mistake companies make in content marketing and the process to mapping your customers’ journeys in order to create content that is actionable and impactful.

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