Changing the game

When Ferran Adrià was building his reputation as a chef in the 1990s, the culinary world had a clear hierarchy. French cuisine owned the territory of sophistication and technique. Italian cuisine owned authenticity and tradition. For a Spanish chef with ambitions beyond his country's borders, the obvious move was to compete within one of those frames, to be more rigorous than the French or more rooted than the Italians. Adrià did something different. He asked a question that neither frame had room for: what if a meal were a sensorial journey, full of surprise, fun and genuine stimulation, where every dish challenged what the diner thought food could be? That question took him out of the existing competitive space entirely and into territory that nobody else occupied. The diner was no longer a passive receiver of a star chef's culinary prowess. Adrià turned them into an explorer, someone who reconnected with the hidden possibilities of ingredients, who played along with the chef in a spirit of amusement and awe. elBulli became the most influential restaurant in the world, and Adrià became a reference not just for chefs but for anyone thinking seriously about creativity and innovation.

Choosing a transformative value proposition is a decision with strategic consequences that reach into every dimension of how a personal brand operates.

Finding the right transformation

To be able to work at the level of transformation, we have to ask deeper questions and we have to look at more essential aspects of the relation we establish with our public. When we are looking at the problems we resolve, we can go further and ask what is the fundamental nature of the pain of our clients. For instance, the financial adviser who sells pension funds, can go beyond the need of her clients for planning life after work. She can dig into identity projection and identity building, she can factor in uncertainty and fear, and she can also consider the social context in which her clients live. These are all elements that work at the subconscious level and contribute to forming the sense of self of her clients: who they are. If she has an understanding of these dimensions, she can offer a proposal that is identitary, she can help her clients access a new territory, evolve, and ultimately transform their lives in directions that are desirable. The fundamental move here is a creative imagination of the future and the underlying question is one that innovators love: "what if".

Ferran Adrià started with a tension he observed in haute cuisine: the most celebrated restaurants in the world were producing food of extraordinary technical quality, and diners were impressed, but rarely surprised. The sensory and intellectual potential of a meal was largely unexplored. The "what if" question followed naturally: what if a diner left a restaurant having experienced something that changed how they thought about food, creativity, even reality itself?

Once that question is clear, the competitive landscape changes. While the competition was operating at the benefit and experience levels, delivering excellence within established culinary traditions, Adrià spotted a new possibility that changed the nature of the dining experience. Reading the context added a further signal: the 1990s were a moment of significant cultural openness to experimentation across the arts, design and gastronomy. The conditions were right for a chef willing to make a radical move.

The identity of your client

When a personal brand addresses the deepest pain of its client and works with them towards a transformation, it is almost always working at the level of identity. The client is trying to become something, and the personal brand becomes a partner in that process. Russell Belk's research on the extended self showed that people incorporate into their sense of who they are the things and relationships that matter to them most deeply. A personal brand operating at the transformation level becomes part of how its public understands their own possibilities.

Susan Fournier's work on brand relationships gives this a practical dimension. Fournier demonstrated that people form genuine relational bonds with brands, bonds that have duration, emotional investment and a sense of mutual commitment. When a personal brand touches the identity of its client, the relationship it produces is qualitatively different from a service relationship. Roberto Otamendi is a former executive and board chairman who has built his personal brand around helping CEOs redesign their strategic agenda and recover their capacity to concentrate on what matters. He is retained because the CEOs who work with him come to see their role differently, and that shift in self-understanding is something they want to sustain. The relationship endures because it is anchored in identity, not in a deliverable.

A different game entirely

Choosing the transformation level reshapes the entire architecture of a personal brand. Positioning changes, because the relevant competitive space is different and the claim being made is about a different kind of value. The relationship with the public changes, for the reasons Belk and Fournier describe. The narrative changes, because the story a transformation-level personal brand tells is about the change it produces in others. And the promotional logic changes, because the evidence of value at this level is the transformation itself, visible in how clients speak about what they have undergone, in the questions they now ask that they could not have asked before, in the decisions they make that were previously unavailable to them.

Mercè Brey is a consultant and an authority in leadership and equality whose work accompanies women and leaders on their empowerment journey through books, lectures, workshops, mentoring and experiential events in nature. Her positioning is in a space she has largely defined herself, working with women who are ready to occupy their deserved place in organisations and in life with full confidence. Her narrative centres on the women who have gone through her programmes and emerged with a different relationship to their own power. Her promotional strategy is built around letting the 'what if' question emerge in the mind of her public. She publishes content that provokes, offers keynotes that inspires and opens genuine conversations in her one to one interactions.

That is the game Adrià changed in gastronomy, and it is the game available to any personal brand willing to ask the right question about what their public most deeply needs to undergo.