Post by Arjan Schimmel

"Transformational" is now claimed as a customer deliverable by more businesses than I can count. However, many organisations using it have given little or no thought to what it would actually take to change a customer's life. Joe Pine's Transformation Economy is often read as a new label for what businesses already do, when in fact it is the opposite. To give the word meaning, first the following question needs to be answered: what lasting change do we want to create in our customers, and how will we bring it about? Transformation is an identity change. The customer moves from "I was this" to "I am now that." That only happens when an organisation designs for it: priming people beforehand, helping them make meaning afterwards and sustaining the change over time. Skip that work and you are still selling an experience, whatever you label it. I have spent years building this rather than branding it. On large-scale residential projects in the GCC, the aim was never an amenity list. It was a genuinely new way of living. A community where people feel safe and, often for the first time, part of a real neighbourhood. One where every day feels like it is weekend and the line between living and leisure dissolves. Those are not taglines. They are lifestyles that did not exist for those residents before, and they took deliberate design to deliver. The change in how someone lives is the product. Everything else is the means to it. So ask for your own business: what change do you want to create in your customers' lives? Answer that with honesty, design for it with intent, and transformation becomes the thing you actually deliver.