The Transformation Economy

 

 “Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformation that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.” 

-        Jean Piaget, psychologist

“[When I read a normal novel], I know what I am going to experience is reality, as expressed and transfigured through art. Reality translated to a higher plane, a more passionate intensity, than most of us can experience at all without the help of art or religion or profound emotion, but reality.  The shared world, the scene of our mortality.”

-       Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction writer

                    Earthrise image from Pixabay

Humans are famously averse to change, even positive change. We get used to things as they are and learn to deal with them that way. Just as we learn how to be a child, we must start to deal with adolescence. Change requires learning and focus as well as truth suspension so that the new ways can begin to take hold. Yet our lives are constantly evolving, and at each new stage, transformation is the rule.

Starting with coaching, tutoring, diet and exercise, learning new things, situations, and people, even a new career, improving playing sports or speaking ability, planning and seeking out the next opportunity—even faith marketing is an offering about the transformation of salvation.

Joe Pine who, with Jim Gilmore, developed the Experience Economy in 1999, is now at work on defining the next stage of economic value: the latest in the long progression starting with commodities, to goods, to services, to experiences, and now personal transformation—a state where the transformed customer or client is the product. 

In the trajectory of progression of economic value, each stage is an evolution into a more sophisticated and higher-level format as the earlier stage becomes commodified, made less special and distinctive by concerns for efficiency, volume, and replicability (see Pine’s Harvard Business Review article on the slippage of value at Starbucks, June 26, 2024).  Businesses that cannot focus beyond the horizon to appreciate how experiences are sought after by customers as vehicles of transformation, risk regressing back to commodities. The Starbucks premise is important because for the cost of a latte, the high-end in-store experience confirms and encourages a quality-of-life interlude that validates the self-image of aspiration, aesthetic taste, and anticipation of a lifetime identity based on those class values. This is the same business model used by the upper-end mall, which creates an ambience of affluence to assure (or convince) customers that they can afford --and deserve to own—the upscale furniture, art, clothing style, jewelry, cosmetics, shoes, and dining on offer. These offerings, properly analyzed, also contain seeds of transformation that can be identified, spotlighted, and cultivated by marketing.

At the individual level, traced by our own Cultural Studies’ original age-stage development chart, transformation is the objective and the endpoint of four developmental life cycles: awareness, learning, reconciliation, and finally transformation, over each of four 20-year cycles from infancy to 75 years+.

At the level of economy, Transformation reflects the current globalization, technology growth, with increased trade and travel (the US travel industry is the world’s largest), along with higher education, extreme experiences, and search for meaning in all sorts of activities, skills, and achievements: starting with the high-stakes competition of college admission and moving across generations to the search for transcendent meaning in longevity, the marketing term “age wave.”  In psychologist Abraham Maslow’s pyramid progression of human needs, the Self-Actualization level is the top echelon and highest evolved of human life, the transformed human being. One example is the US Army pledge to make you “Be all you can be.”

In folklore and film, the agent of change is a magician who transforms Moses, Jesus, Cinderella’s fairy godmother, Aladin’s genie, the Wizard of Oz, Pollyanna.  Transformation was a gift. Now, it is the gift we give ourselves. Learning is transformational: there is a reason the race to the top of college entry is the leading contest of life’s second decade. (This makes the application essay that stage’s heaviest-weighted writing assignment with a lifetime payoff.) 

Pine and Gilmore’s Chart Transformation is inherent in human life across life stages. The journey from child to adolescent sets much of our personal history, with each adult stage, built around a diverse set of needs and wants. Now more attention is being paid to the aging process at the far end of life, coping with losses and illness inherent in a final search for meaning. With the world population moving into its 60s and 70s, led by the Baby Boom, this stage focuses on spirituality, vitality, creativity, and dying in the final decades migrating toward death. Author Sebastian Junger’s latest book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (2024), about his own near-death experience, is a current case.

The transformational medical spa industry has grown to make over the look of aging; yoga and pickleball are athletic pursuits that can be practiced well into late aging. The idea of age as a condemnation of infirmity and inactivity is fading, as the lifespan grows from the outcome of medical innovations and interventions and their integration.  People are expecting to have second, third, and fourth careers; in the 1980s, an AARP headline asked the question “What will you do for your second career?” Late bloomers are finding a welcome in industry and the arts, as well as athletics. As for the young, expectations are just as trying, building the high-school resume designed to apply to elite colleges, career-priming, and entrepreneurship early in life, as credentials for ever-growing development of mind, body, and the social network set to extend well into the 8th and 9th decades of life.

Life expectancy has more than doubled worldwide from thirty-two at the start of the 20^th century to seventy-one in 2000. With this aging revolution, the range of changes over a lifetime, including extended old age, have multiplied, as explained in Ken Dychtwald’s Age Wave: How the Most Important Trend of Our Time Will Change Your Future, in 1989. The world is only now figuring out what this will mean for experience and transformation as the global economy serves increasing numbers of over-65 customers, and families start to include four or even five generations, blended by cross-ethnic parenthood as well as re-marriages.

At least 100,000 years ago, the conquest of fire transformed human existence, channeling our diets to cooked meat protein, expanding our brain power, and allowing us the control and security of a lighted and heated communal hearth. It exerted a kind of magic over human development by taking a natural element and creating a science and practice around it – a game changer, the kind people seek out in their personal journey through the development of their identity and self-invention.  This is no mere hack or transition but an irreversible direction containing its own drivers. Even weight loss and the simple cosmetic makeover echoes the transformation process, involving seeing the potential for change, basing that change model on what’s available and doable, in seeking out a new-and-improved transformed version of the past and present.

 
Anything that enables this process holds the potential for an economic niche, or a place in a wider field like education, skill mastery, mate-seeking, wealth, wellness, discovery (exploration, new skills, new connections, redefining the past). And transformations, lasting change catalyzed by experience, enjoy a higher price point and a long-term connection between the business and the customer. It also calls for a deeper understanding of customer aspirations, the development process at work over the lifespan, and the rich potential of ongoing positive experiences for change within this ongoing relationship.

This kind of experience is transformational in itself, opening up the world through new ideas and identity-seeking. Such as the life pilgrimage tour of Europe or other personal heritage homelands like Israel—or 23AndMe might transform your idea of who you are just by naming your genetic places of origin. In classic extreme expeditions, take climbing Mt. Everest, where enabling technology has invited many more-average climbers to challenge the summit and contribute to the death count. The challenge proved to be more than amateurs could anticipate or even imagine. But for the survivors, extreme travel (even into space at many thousands per seat) is part of the initiation value. Archeological digs, deep-sea dives, Antarctic cruises, and safaris offer similar payoffs, and their marketing literature stresses the link between the customized extreme and achievement of benchmark or “bucket” goals for achieving personal best.

Membership clubs, like alumni groups, carry the experience beyond the moment into the future with the cache of peers who have achieved the extraordinary and transformative—which can be based on talent, interest, participation--or simply cost.  Transformation is the internal dimension of a social initiation—including college, graduate school, or a master class. Dale Carnegie discovered his calling as a transformer when he taught public speaking at a local YMCA.

Of course, education is a life investment in upward mobility, one that is not only now super-expensive but requires inordinate time and focus to achieve, unlike the status of driving a Mercedes or owning a Rothko.  Becoming a doctor or lawyer is a question of being, not just doing.

Consider how one kind of travel, the NASA program, has transformed our ideas of the possible by sending exploration technology into deep space and astronauts to the moon, where seeing their home planet from 250,000 miles away made their new perspective into a life-changing experience. Suddenly the earth was not the central or sole concern.  Along with Big Data and AI, the center of human affairs has realigned to encompass far more space and many more possible futures for the earth race.