From competition to transformation

Let's face it: competition is hard and most of us operate in highly competitive environments.

What many of us do in response is refine our offer, sharpen our positioning, communicate our value more clearly and pursue other marketing efforts along the same lines. These are reasonable responses, and they have their place. But they operate within the same competitive logic that created the problem. They ask: how do I stand out among people doing similar things?

A different question

The transformation approach asks a different question entirely: what if standing out were not the goal?

It's a radical change in perspective. The first question puts the spotlight on the professional: how do I show up, how do I differentiate, how do I win attention in a crowded room. The second puts the spotlight on the public: what does this person need to become, and can I help them get there? When the focus moves from the professional to the person they serve, the logic of competition gives way to the logic of value. And value is difficult to resist.

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, in The Experience Economy, mapped a progression of economic value that moves from commodity through benefits, services and experience to transformation. The progression represents a map of possibilities. It shows that value can be created at different levels, and that each level implies a different relationship between the professional and the people they serve. At the lower levels, value resides in what is delivered. At the experience level value resides in what the other person feels and at the transformation level it opens a new conversation and asks what the other person can become.

A deliberate choice

Choosing to operate at the transformation level is a deliberate decision about the kind of impact you want to have and the kind of relationship you want to build with the people you serve. A financial adviser who helps clients plan for retirement can do excellent work at the service level. The same adviser, choosing the transformation level, asks a different question: what type of life does a person dream of after retirement, and how can I help them get there? A similar change in perspective produces an entirely different relationship between the financial adviser and the clients she serves.

Why it works

Russell Belk's research on the relation between our consumption and our sense of self helps explain why. Belk showed that people extend their sense of self through the things they incorporate into their lives, including the brands they choose to associate with closely. A personal brand operating at transformation level becomes a partner in identity building and helps her clients and stakeholders define who they are and who they can become. From a strategic perspective, the opportunity is quite relevant. As a personal brand, we can become part of the identity of our stakeholders, establishing a relationship that can hardly become deeper.

Susan Fournier's work on brand relationships gives this a further dimension. Fournier demonstrated that people form genuine relational bonds with brands, bonds that have duration, emotional texture and mutual investment. A personal brand at transformation level is participating in something the other person is trying to build in their own life. That participation, when authentic and sustained, produces a form of loyalty that no repositioning can replicate, because the bond is between a person and a resource that has become part of their identity.

Two people who chose differently

My friend Roberto Otamendi made this choice deliberately. With a long career as an executive and as chairman of several boards, he had the credentials to operate at the benefit level with considerable leverage. Instead he chose to focus on why many CEOs experience frustration and fall short of expectations from the board. He asked why a CEO is dragged into daily firefighting and tactical decisions and how she can find the space and calm to sit down and think of what really moves the needle. In concentrating on redefining the CEO's agenda, he is reshaping how a CEO understands and performs her role. CEOs and boards that work with Roberto stay with him, because they understand the value of perspective and they step into a new vision of who they are.

Mercè Brey made the same choice in a different field. Her work in leadership and equality operates through books, lectures, workshops, mentoring, and through an experiential event in nature that produces a radical shift in how participants see themselves and their place in the world. The women who go through that process do not just get new tools to up their game in their professional life. They leave changed. Mercè helps them find the power within and become a force for good in the contexts they operate within. She arrived at this because she asked better questions, concentrating on a vision of empowered women that occupy with confidence their deserved space in organisations and in life.

That type of question is available to any professional willing to ask it. What does my public need to become? What shift in perspective or self-understanding would change the most for them? Am I willing to organise my personal brand around that change rather than around my own competences?

The functional foundation still matters. Roberto Otamendi's systemic thinking rests on decades of genuine executive experience. Mercè Brey's retreats are grounded in rigorous research and professional craft. What changes is where the focus lies: in what you deliver, or in what you make possible.