What You Must Deliver to Win Customers Today

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ALISON BEARD: Adi, what was your New Year’s resolution for 2026?

ADI IGNATIUS: We do more predictions than resolutions. I have lots of predictions, but I guess my ongoing resolution for the year is to launch a book project.

ALISON BEARD: Ooh, that sounds exciting. I can’t wait to read it. Mine was a little bit simpler. It was trying for a dry January, which I mostly stuck to, though I had a sneaky glass of Prosecco two weeks in. But the point is that a lot of people are setting aspirational goals right now, not just in January, but all year long like you, because increasingly that’s what we want to spend our money on, not products or services or even enjoyable experiences, but on bettering ourselves, whether that’s losing weight or learning a new language or figuring out how to do something like writing a book.-

ADI IGNATIUS: Well, and now having said this publicly, the pressure is now on to actually achieve that. So wittingly or unwittingly, I have put more pressure on myself to achieve it.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I use that strategy too. I told anyone who was listening that I was trying not to have wine in January. But our guest today thinks there’s a huge business opportunity in helping people not do it themselves through willpower or techniques like the one you just talked about, but through structures that help them transform. So he’s talking about everything from health and wellness businesses to nonprofit educational institutions to financial services firms.

He wants leaders to start thinking more holistically about what they can do for customers to help them achieve meaningful goals, not just selling them what they make or supply, but supporting them along the way. And here’s the kicker, only getting paid if they’re successful.

ADI IGNATIUS: So that sounds interesting. It also sounds really expensive and it sounds really risky.

ALISON BEARD: Yes. But he says that when you get it right, it can be a huge boost to long-term performance. He has lots of case studies and he’s going to explain exactly what it takes to succeed with this kind of transformation offering. B. Joseph Pine II is co-founder of Strategic Horizons, and author of the book, The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations. Here’s our conversation.

In your previous work, you’ve talked about the shift from products and services to experience. And why is what you call the transformation economy the next evolution?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Well, it’s because of the basic framework I put in both books called the Progression of Economic Value. And it describes how value that companies create has changed over millennia from the agrarian economy based off commodities, through the industrial economy, based off goods through the service economy. And what happened in the latter half of the 20th century, we shifted into an experience economy where again, experiences are a distinct economic offering, built to top services and goods. And now what’s happening is while all five economic offerings have been around, the fifth one is coming more to the fore. And the fifth one is, as we say, transformations. Transformations where you use experiences as a raw material to guide customers to change, to help them achieve their aspirations, to help them become who they want to become.

ALISON BEARD: So what is the impetus for companies that are doing well at selling products, services, or experiences already to make this shift to guiding transformations?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Every one of my books has had a boogeyman, right? And what this is, the boogeyman is commoditization, commoditization. Commoditization is like the law of gravity. If you do nothing, then eventually your offerings will be commoditized. And so, what that means then is you can be successful at commoditization with generally only one or two industries that automate as much as possible, get rid of as many people as possible. They can still succeed, but it’s no fun. I’ll put it that way.

What you need to do is think about how do we then shift up this progression of economic value? How do we innovate where we are and create new offerings that aren’t yet commodities and then shift up to create the next level of value? And we’ve already seen where some experiences are commoditized. I think the theme restaurant industry went into commoditization mode a long time ago. I and a colleague wrote an article for the HBR back in June of ’24 about how Starbucks was commoditizing itself basically because it’s focusing on efficiency rather than the coffee drinking experience.

There’s a huge opportunity that people increasingly are looking for help because change is hard. It’s just fundamentally hard. It’s hard to do on your own. And so, companies are increasingly positioned to help people achieve their aspirations as well as businesses with B2B transformations.

ALISON BEARD: So what are the key differences between offering experiences? And they could be aspirational experiences and making yourself better types of experiences. What are the key differences between that and transformation?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Well, as I said, transformations are built on top of experiences and many experiences are already transformative. In fact, even without trying to make them transformative, we all have life-changing experiences, just one single experience that changes us. What transformations generally take is not that one life-changing experience, but a series of experiences: change over time that take you upwards into the right from where you are today to achieving your aspirations. And so, it requires working with people over time to have a full transformation offering as opposed to, I’ll use the term merely, but it’s much more than merely a transformative experience.

ALISON BEARD: And what do you think is going on in culture or consumer psychology here that people are wanting to invest in transformation? Is it driven by social media because we’re constantly bombarded by these ideas of life hacking and self-improvement and also images of all these other people who are skinnier, richer, happier than we are?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Yes, and much more. So one thing I recognized again is that transformations have always been around. But what happens over time is we increasingly seek companies to help us. That’s one of the factors with transformations, knowing that we have more disposable income, which is a part of it, which allows us to spend it on things that are of more value to us. In fact, people want goods and services to be commoditized, so you buy them at the lowest possible price and the greatest possible convenience, so they can spend their hard-earned time and their hard-earned money on experiences and transformations that they value much more highly. So part of it is how rich we have grown over time.

What you say about social media is true and comparing ourselves to others. It’s also true that it’s a fundamental need of a human being to improve, to want to get better, to have aspirations. They come out of the relationships that we have. It may come out of the work that we do. It may be as simple as wanting to improve your golf or tennis game, that you look for coaches to be able to do that. And that’s one of the indicators you see in fact, is think about the rise of coaching occupations over the last 20 or 30 years. It used to be just basically sports. Now you got life coaches and executive coaches and speech coaches and that’s that indicator of how much we want to improve ourselves, how much we want to become, again, who we want to become.

ALISON BEARD: Is this transformation economy for a subsector of consumers or do you see it being more widespread? Is it just for the rich?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: No, no. It is absolutely not just for the rich. It is for everybody. One of the things the rich do very nicely though is that they are able to buy offerings that have very high costs, that have a high price, and then so that the people that provide those can figure out how to do it more efficiently by focusing on the rich and then bringing it down to the middle class and all socioeconomic classes.

So that’s always helpful in any one of these economic shifts, just like the rich bought cars at thousands of dollars that people couldn’t afford until Henry Ford figured out how to mass produce them and give them to the masses. We see that sort of thing now in many different fields of transformation.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Celebrity personal trainers creating an online fitness plan. So give me a good example of a company that’s switched from offering products, services, or experiences to transformations.

1. JOSEPH PINE II: You can think about fitness centers in general that treat themselves as a service, but they’re an experience because you’re paying for the time that you spend there, monthly membership fees, admission fees or membership fees put you in the experience business, but many have gone beyond that to provide a level of programmatic offerings. It’s not just here’s all the stuff that we will work with you personally, understand what your individual aspirations are, and so, can go beyond that generally for extra fees, often on a personal trainer basis to be able to help people actually achieve what they say they want to do when they join the fitness center.

I’ll give you another example, Medtronic, which provides physical goods and you have pacemakers and other medical devices. And their former CEO now had an interview with the Wall Street Journal a few years ago where he talked about how he was moving Medtronics and as all of healthcare is moving towards outcome-based pricing, that we put a pacemaker in and it doesn’t work for you, why are you paying thousands of dollars for that? Because outcomes matter, not inputs.

So you see many companies that are shifting into that direction as well, consulting companies and B2B have always been in the transformation business. Nobody hires a consulting company unless they want to change business as a result, but they are increasingly charging for that, charging for the outcome that they want through various different means of success pricing and so forth. McKinsey just recently announced how particularly the rise of AI, they’re increasingly moving to outcomes-based pricing as well. Inputs don’t matter, only the outcomes. So when you sell the outcomes, then you’re economically in the transformation business.

ALISON BEARD: So I can see how the transformation economy works in the health and wellness industry. I can see it working in beauty, education, financial services, any place where self-improvement is really at the forefront. Do you see lessons for other industries that might be less obvious?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: You just pointed out what I call the four spheres of transformation. I keen off of the old proverb about being healthy, wealthy, wise. So there’s health and wellbeing, there’s wealth and prosperity, there’s knowledge and wisdom, and then there’s one more, which the old proverb didn’t include, which is purpose and meaning. There’s a lot of transformations geared around those.

If I think broadly, which is why it’s not just healthcare, it’s health and wellbeing. Wellbeing encompasses just a whole lot of things that customers generally pay out of their own pocket versus insurance companies or third party payers that pay for healthcare. Prosperity covers a lot more than just money. It’s about how you live a good life. Knowledge and wisdom is not just about paying for education, but practical things that help you live your lives in a way that become prosperous because.

But the thing to do for any industry is really the old Toyota production system method of asking five whys. Why are your customers buying from you? And why do they want that? And why do they want that? And however many it takes, you get down to a core aspiration.

You can think, for example, about accounting. Why do people want accountants? Why? Well, it’s because they want to have a better handle on their information. Why do they want to have a better handle in their information? Well, so they can use it in ways that improve their business. And as you go down to a track until you recognize, okay, this is why they want us. It’s actually to improve their business, to enhance them. Each one, and maybe a general aspiration, each one will have a particular thing they’re focusing on. Now, how can I turn my accounting services into a transformation that helps them actually achieve that core aspiration that goes beyond the tracking data and delivering reports?

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So let’s talk about how a leader might shift their organization to this way of thinking. What is the first step in understanding what might resonate with customers, either existing ones or potential ones?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Well, the first step really is to understand their aspirations. Every economic offering has its own type of customer or something that you should call it. Commodities have markets, goods have users, services have clients, experiences have guests. With transformations, it’s aspirants. They’re an aspirant. They aspire to become. So what are their aspirations? How do you figure that out? Again, you may have some general aspiration for what you’re doing as a business, but you have to get down ideally to every individual person and recognize that their aspirations are unique to them and are going to differ in some ways. And so, often that requires a dialogue or requires a collaboration. I in fact, call it’s one of the phases of transformation. It’s a diagnosis, to use the medical term.

Who is this customer now? What is their identity? Recognizing that all transformation is identity change. So, understanding who are they today, what their identity is, what do they want to become? And what I encourage companies to do in the book is to develop from to statements. From X to Y. Where are they today? What do they want to become? And then through that diagnosis, you then design the set of experiences that take them from where they are today to what to want to become, recognizing that there’s often regress as well as progress. So you have to really to sense and respond what they are doing and be able to then keep them on track as they get off track.

ALISON BEARD: It’s a bold idea that businesses and a lot of different types of businesses should get involved in personal identity change. And it’s so high touch and involves a really individualized perspective on your customers. So it wasn’t possible before all the technological advances that we’ve had recently, including AI, I imagine.

1. JOSEPH PINE II: What I recognize is that as commoditization drags you down, customization lifts you up. And so, yes, because they are happen inside of you, they are inherently individual and you do want to customize as much as possible. You want to mass customize, efficiently customize as much as possible. And that of course is where things like AI can come in.

And you think about AI’s use in healthcare and therapy and to be able to understand the individual and do the right things for them, ask the right questions to them. There are some dangers with that, of course, and that we’ve got to be cognizant of and be able to respond to and handle, but technology today just is so much more effective of being able to understand individuals customized to them.

One of the things we see, for example, is the rise of your first experience platforms and then transformation platforms. So for example, BetterUp is a coaching platform. Basically they do a diagnosis about what you’re looking for, what coach you want, what your personality style is, and they present three coaches to you and you view them, you swipe left or swipe right. If you don’t like any of them, you can get another set of three until you find someone that seems right for you.

And then, the coaching is all done virtually. It’s not by AI directly, but you’re having this one-on-one conversations, but then the AI can help between those virtual conversations that’s done over phone or over a computer and can keep track of things. It can present what the next opportunities are and so forth that is done then through the individual personal coach.

ALISON BEARD: So as companies are thinking about the different types of transformations or all of the elements of transformation they want to offer customers, what kinds of buckets should they be considering?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Well, one of the things to do is to use jobs to be done theory, which was pioneered 30, 40 years ago and Clayton Christensen popularized 10, 20 years ago. My colleague, Dave Norton, has taught me a lot about that. He runs an insights consultancy called Stone Mantel. And he keyed off of one thing that was one of Clayton Christensen’s articles, which is he talked about there’s functional, emotional, and social jobs to be done.

And then we then added the fact, well, then there are aspirational jobs to be done that directly affect transformations, but you can’t forget the functional, emotional and social. In fact, with any experience, with any transformation, the need to handle people’s emotions is incredibly important. There are always emotional things going on. There are social things like you talked about with social media about wanting to how I relate to other people, how I look to other people and appear to them and so forth, as well as there are functional things about doing my reps or eating the right food and tracking things and so forth. And so, you have to do all of those.

And Dave even added a fifth job to be done more recently called systemic jobs, where you develop a system that allows you to do all this. And that’s something that’s very important for transformation guiders as well, is to develop that system. I mentioned the first three phases of transformation, which is first diagnosis and then the set of experiences, but there’s a third phase called follow through. And that’s ensuring that the transformation takes hold, that it’s sustained through time.

If I go through a smoking cessation program and after six or eight weeks I quit smoking, but then three months later I line up again, was I truly transformed? And so, often that’s a systemic job to be done. How do I integrate this into my life in a way that I ensure that I stay on track, ensure that I don’t backslide again, ensure even that I’m actually continuing to uptick in whatever dimension of identity it is that I want to change.

ALISON BEARD: And are there any other practices that need to change or organizational restructures that need to happen to reorient around transformation?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Yeah, there are. And frankly, I’m not sure of all that’s going to take to be able to do that for many companies. But one thing is to recognize the economic function that you’re doing, again, is guiding. So you need to think of your people as guides. Now you may not use that term, you may use coach, you may use counselor, you may use navigator and curator, but to recognize that their function changes from a much more external view. It’s not about what I do, it’s not my inputs, it’s not the service activities that I provide. It’s about the outcomes that our customers get and I’m guiding them through that process. So you very much always need to sense and respond what is going on.

As a coach or a counselor, you need to be attuned to them individually what’s happening, what’s maybe happening in their lives that’s outside of your purview, but it is a function of guiding because that’s impacting what they’re able to do to achieve their aspirations. So that’s one of the key things that I think is needed to be able to truly get into the transformation business.

ALISON BEARD: And how do pricing and business models shift in this new transformation economy?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Well, one of the things I love to say is that you are what you charge for. If you charge for undifferentiated stuff, you’re in the commodities business. If you charge for tangible things, you’re in the goods business. If you charge for the activities your people perform, you’re in the services business, and economically you’re in the experience business if and only if you charge for time. The time your customers spend with you, admission fee, membership fee or other way of doing that.

With transformations, what’s important is that you charge for the demonstrated outcomes that your customers achieve because inputs don’t matter again, only outcomes. So you just switch that around and charge for what they get out of it. And there’s several ways I’ve encountered to do that among the hundreds of companies I know that do that today. One key way is to charge a transformation guarantee, to guarantee.

So often it can be 100% guarantee. Often the most number I’ve seen most frequently is 25% guarantee of that. If we didn’t do what we said we do, if you didn’t get out of it, the outcome you wanted, then we’ll give you money back. And that’s what a lot of consulting companies are doing now is do that guarantee or do another way, which is a success fee that you pay us accordingly to how much success you get, to how much outcomes you actually receive.

One of my favorite examples there is Texas State Technical University. A number of years ago, the state government, which funds all of these technical universities, went to all of them and said, look, we pay you based on credit hours. That’s an input. And basically it’s when a student signs up for a course and they pay their part of the tuition and we pay you a certain amount. Whether the student actually goes to the course, whether the student learns anything from it, whether they’re able to gain any gainful employment out of it, whatever. And so they said, “What we want is…” They may not have used the word outcome, but we want is you to actually provide the outcomes that we’re looking for, which is basically successful citizens. And one way to measure that is they pay taxes so that we know.

And so, they went to all the technical colleges and said, “How much would you be willing to put at risk of our funding for you based on the actually outcomes you achieve?” Most said 0, some said 5, 10%. Texas state said 100%. Think about this. So 100% of their funding. And one of the things that charges for outcomes does, or in this case being funded for outcomes, is it’s a catalytic mechanism. If your income is dependent on your customer’s outcomes, students in this case, then it’s a catalytic mechanism for we got to do everything right.

So they actually, they did get rid of some of the classes or courses that they had. They did get rid of some of the teachers. They added new ones. They changed the way they matriculated students into it and introduced them to them. They changed the way they kept track of what they’re doing and even what happened after they left college.

The success was tremendous. They actually get a lot more funding from the state because they improved their outcomes. And it became so much that they then are able to offer a tuition guarantee to their students that if they don’t get a job within their major within, I think it’s six months of graduation, they get their entire tuition money back, 100%.

ALISON BEARD: That’s an amazing story. I can imagine every CFO saying, “That’s way too risky.” We cannot charge based on something that’s out of our control because ultimately transformations rely on the consumers doing what they need to do.

1. JOSEPH PINE II: It’s really a paradox that you cannot guarantee a transformation, and yet it’s the best way to make that transformation is in fact a guarantee. And one of the reason you see 25% as a frequent number is because that’s basically all profit that we’ve covered our costs at least in general, most companies. So it’s not we’re going to lose money. And most companies, every company I know of rarely pays it out because of that catalytic mechanism. But it’s also the case that you don’t have to charge everything at the transformation level. You can charge some things at the service level. You can charge some things at the experience level, like create a membership fee for it, and then have a portion of it that’s guaranteed at that transformation level, and you may be able to do 100% transformation.

I know companies that do it purely qualitatively. You just say, “Did we do what we said we do? Did you get outcome you want?” And most customers do not shaft you, particularly because of that emotional connection that you need with those emotional jobs to be done.

ALISON BEARD: So it’s like your premium offering is the transformation.

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Right, right. It can very well be that.

ALISON BEARD: And presumably the people who are willing to engage in it and invest in it are really committed.

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Correct. And so, that’s the second thing is you want a commitment. Before you offer that guarantee, you get them to commit to it. And then that then is an emotional thing that you can come back to it time and time again. And you can have milestones on the way versus just that capstone achievement of the aspiration to ensure that everything’s on track. And so there’s many, many different ways to do it. And to the CFOs, I can say, yeah, this also is a big, scary thing, but it’s the way to truly get into transformations. It’s the way to take advantage of this opportunity. It’s the way to ensure that you do as a company the right job for your customers.

ALISON BEARD: What’s the most surprising success story that you’ve seen in the transformation economy as it’s emerging?

1. JOSEPH PINE II: There are so many examples of companies. I think that one I’ll mention is basically is healthcare industry itself, which really recognized the value of experiences 10 or 20 years ago because research shows that the better the patient experience, the better the outcomes. And healthcare companies understand that there is an outcome here. I think there was a lot of backtracking during COVID and everything that was going on, but they recognized that outcomes are important.

For example, colleagues and I worked with one company, Heartland Health in St. Joseph, Missouri, and we helped them develop their own meaningful purpose of why do they exist in the world, which became the theme of all the experience they create, which was live life well. And the idea was that they wanted their patients to live life well. They wanted their patients’ families to live life well. They wanted the communities to live life well, and they wanted their employees to live life well. So out of that abundance, they could then take care of the patients, their families, and the community.

So they actually decided to change the whole name of the company from Heartland Health to Mosaic Life Care. So where healthcare, they said, is a small part of life care, that we want to be with you for your life. We understand that everyone has dreams and aspirations, and how do we make that happen? And so, they completely redesigned their new buildings, everything they came up with to be much more consumer friendly. It’s like walking into a very well architecturally done retail store more than a hospital, and they work effectively to make that happen and develop, for example, a life plan for each one of their patients. Again, so it’s not just about the health, they’re focused on that health and wellbeing into their life.

I’ll cite a startup, a financial company called Simplany, and they’re a B2B2C company based here in the Minneapolis area where I live. And they basically designed a system for financial advisors to work with their customers on. And the key is that the system doesn’t just look at what are your financial goals because your financial goals should be subservient to your life goals. And they call it life and legacy, recognizing that many people are wealthy enough, they’re going to leave a legacy behind, whether to their kids, their grandkids, or to other organizations that are out there that support the ideals that they have.

So the conversation completely changes when they use this system around those factors, which then yields itself to financial goals. And then they do this, the founder, Alex Korn, is like a math whiz, and they do all this math to be able to help you understand exactly what you’re going to be able to contribute to your life and to your legacy, how that changes.

If you have a thing, “Hey, we want to get a retirement home someplace.” We just plug that into the thing and says, “This is what it does. This is what it leaves, left. You still have a 97% chance of achieving your life and legacy goals.” And because that change in conversation, it very much becomes transformational because it gets the customers focused on their life and legacy goals as opposed to just how much money is there. Going from wealth to prosperity. Wealth is the means to which prosperity is the end and life and legacy are the elements of that. And it’s a startup, hasn’t gone public yet, but their growth numbers are fantastic and making a great progress on getting that into various financial advisors’ offices.

ALISON BEARD: Well, Joe, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for being with me.

1. JOSEPH PINE II: Thank you, Alison. I appreciate the opportunity.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Joe Pine, co-founder of Strategic Horizons, and author of the book, The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations.

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Thanks to our team, senior producer, Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox, and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.