Arrrrr! 🏴☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Dive into an audiobook | Listen to a category design jam session | Enroll in the free Strategy Sprint email course
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
What do Disney theme parks, Tough Mudder races, and Burning Man have in common?
They aren’t just experiences — they transform who you are.
According to Joe Pine, a fellow category designer and co-author of The Experience Economy, transformative experiences are the future of business. It’s not about selling products or “vibes.” It’s about guiding your customers to become who they want to be.
Think about it:
Disneyland doesn’t just sell tickets. They let you become a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge.
Tough Mudder doesn’t just offer obstacles. They turn you into someone who thrives on the impossible.
Burning Man isn’t just an art and music festival. It’s a utopia where you rediscover freedom, creativity, and community.
Companies that create experiences aren’t just selling—they’re changing lives.
In this Contributing Pirate mini-book, we’re diving into Joe’s work on transformations.
If Joe’s name sounds familiar, it’s because his work shapes how we think about customer experiences as narrative-driven adventures. In The Hero’s Journey, Joe challenged us to reimagine the customer’s path as a story of transformation. Today, he takes it even further to show how to design experiences that engage AND fundamentally change lives. He’s been using this approach for decades to help businesses create new and different categories that no one else can compete in.
“Transformations” isn’t a word he uses for flash — it’s intentional Languaging.
It’s also not a sleazy sales gimmick to get people to spend more money.
(Joe will explain why).
When you move beyond memorable experiences, you can begin to deliver transformations that change how people think, act, and live.
Imagine your business helps people achieve their deepest aspirations: becoming healthier, mastering a new skill, or designing a fulfilling career. (Like how Apple watches turn health tracking into a movement toward longevity. Or how Peloton is a community that inspires you to become the best version of yourself.)
Joe will break down why transformative experiences matter, how to create them, and why they’re the key to building loyalty so deep that no competitor can touch you.
Ready to reject the transactional mindset and help your Superconsumers achieve their deepest goals?
Let’s dive in.
Every word that follows comes straight from Joe Pine. We're sharing his wisdom exactly as he wrote it. Because when a fellow category designer creates something legendary, you don't mess with it. 🏴☠️
Memorable Experiences engage people in an inherently personal way.
Note that first word: memorable.
For an offering to be a true, distinctive experience, it must create a memory. The residue of the experience that lingers long after it is over—and the longer the better. If there was no memory, there was no experience. Period.
Of course, in the English language the word “experience” covers a very expansive set of situations. There is a sense that if we are awake and conscious we are experiencing, but such mere “sensing” lies largely outside of economic offerings (and where it is part of an economic offering, such ordinary events happen at the service level). In the economic relationship between company and customer the offering must be memorable to rise to the level of an experience.
To be memorable you must be engaging, reaching inside of people and creating the experience within them.
Commodities, goods, and services exist outside of us, while experiences happen inside of us, which is what makes them inherently personal. When people in enterprises and as consumers think of being engaged, generally they only think of emotional engagement — triggering happiness, sparking surprise, building suspense, and so forth. But understand that you can engage people not only emotionally but physically, intellectually, and spiritually. All four contribute to human flourishing. So in your (transformative) experience design, don’t confine yourself to just designing for emotions.
While all of the frameworks on designing experiences I will share apply to every level of experiences, the four realms of experience is most particularly a model of engagement, helping you design experiences that are robust. But as you do that, you don’t have to limit yourself to designing engaging, robust, and therefore memorable experiences. Think of how you can design your experiences to be meaningful.
Meaningful experiences go beyond memorable by adding a level of significance to us as individuals.
Such experiences connect with us more strongly, particularly in appealing to our humanity, to our personal sense of purpose, to our identity in some way.
Meaningful experiences add a level of significance.
Seeing a blockbuster movie can be a pleasurable way to spend the evening and give you something to talk about later. But watching a documentary that, say, gives you insight into historical events that impacted you or your family can have much more weight and consequence.
Attending a class in college can be memorable for a number of reasons (one of which is hopefully to remember what’s needed to succeed on the test). But taking a community ed class as an adult because you want to learn about gardening, engine repair, or welding can have more lasting significance.
Playing golf on a summer Saturday with your buddies and recounting it afterword on the 19th hole can be most satisfying. But taking a once-in-a-lifetime trip to play golf in Scotland, including a round at St. Andrews, makes much, much more of an impact on your psyche.
And walking into an art gallery as you stroll down a city street may be memorable for what you see and discuss. But experiencing a beloved Vermeer painting in the flesh that you had only ever seen in books proves so much more meaningful.
During and after the COVID-19 pandemic I was interviewed a lot on what it meant for the experience staging. Obviously, it devastated the Experience Economy, for anywhere people wanted to gather was a place no one wanted to be. (Digital experiences blossomed, of course, including new genres still out there today.) But once governments eased their stay-away mandates and experience places opened up again, they almost always filled to capacity, such was the pent-up demand (a quite literal term in this case).
At least in the developed world we do not need more stuff — we have enough “things”, even if we order them online and have them delivered contactlessly. What gives life meaning is the experiences we have with our family, our loved ones, our friends, our colleagues, and, yes, even complete strangers.
We increasingly desire experiences that help us connect with others, to reflect on life, to learn about ourselves.
There was a shift, one that continues to this day, from experiences that are merely memorable to those that are highly meaningful. We still want to get out there and have fun and tour around. But we increasingly desire those experiences that help us connect with others, to reflect on life, to learn about ourselves.
As Colorado State University psychology professor Michael Steger writes:
“Life without meaning would be merely a string of events.”
Of course, meaningful experiences are not a new phenomenon; they’ve always been around, always a part of the Experience Economy. But it’s not something we emphasized in The Experience Economy. It was Albert Boswijk, a longtime friend with whom I cofounded the European Centre for the Experience and Transformation Economy in the Netherlands, who across many discussions impressed on me the importance of meaningful experiences. In the book Economy of Experiences, Albert and his coauthors Ed Peelen and Steven Olthof talk about creating meaning in this way:
The process of creating meaning is what shapes our character and how we interpret our identity. It determines:
what we regard as important and meaningful, what moves us. . . .
the direction in which we want to go. . . .
matters in which we want to invest. . . .
Experience is what determines who we are, our characteristics, what we believe in, what makes us happy and how satisfied we manage to be about ourselves in relations to other.
In addition to making the core point that meaningful experiences have a connection to personal identity, Albert and his coauthors also make note of how the Dutch language (among others) has two words for what we in English use only the one term, “experience”. I learned this myself when The Experience Economy was translated into Dutch as De Belevenis Economie. But after I became a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, many of the discussions I had centered more around the word ervaring. The first word, belevenis, relates to the word for “life” and implies things experienced in the moment, while the second is about those experiences that have significance, stimulate reflection, and matter more over time — that are, in short, meaningful experiences.
We individually determine how meaningful something is.
What is meaningful to each of us is of course highly subjective.
We individually determine how meaningful something is, so there can be a grey area between these first two sub-levels where the experience is only memorable for some but meaningful to others. Indeed, meaning is created by the individual in reaction to and in concert with the experience. Or as the above authors and others say, co-created by the individual, where both parties – aspirant and guide – contribute substantially to what occurs during and within the experience. Therefore, the ideas within the Personal Experiences section below have particular import for creating meaningful experiences.
Transporting experiences take us out of the present space or time, moving us metaphorically to another realm, to an affective if liminal space and time.
When you create memorable and meaningful experiences, you have the further opportunity to make them transporting.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s concept of the “hierarchy of needs” situates at the top self-actualization, the need to fulfill one's full potential. According to Maslow, peak experiences create “moments of highest happiness and fulfillment” and are “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter”. Peak experiences enable individuals to transcend their daily lives through euphoric moments, including religious experiences, getting a “runner’s high”, making a discovery, or by feeling a burst of love, reading an inspirational book, playing moving music, or examining a beautiful painting.
Even going to a theme park!
As Wendy Heimann-Nunes and I wrote for Attractions Management:
Take, for instance, Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Here, lifelong fans aren’t mere guests, but experience full euphoria as integral parts of the narrative – donning a costume; being a character in a galaxy far, far away; exploring new facets of their own identity in a universe that captivated them for years. Through these attractions, guests leave their daily lives behind and try “new versions of themselves with the agency to be a force for good or evil” as Scott Trowbridge, Senior Creative Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, told us. People also undergo peak experiences at Pandora – The World of Avatar, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, One World Observatory at the World Trade Center in New York – as well as numerous relatively immersive attractions without the big budgets of a Walt Disney or Universal Studios.
Wendy, an intellectual property lawyer focused on experience venues, gave me the term “transporting experiences” when, in writing our article, she told me of an amazing experience she had in and around a theme park ride. And that while it was not transformative, she excitedly said it “transported” her.
Such phenomena extend beyond memorable moments and meaningful events to elevate our existence, at least for a time.
As some of the quick examples above attest, one way to have a peak experience is through flow, and all flow experiences are likewise transporting.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered and named the concept of flow, an “optimal experience” where the challenges you face are relatively balanced with your skills. Csikszentmihalyi gives the examples of “making music, rock climbing, dancing, sailing, and chess”. But you can get into this state of elevated engagement in most any endeavor you face with passion and persistence. His research found that flow “provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality.”
When the challenge exceeds your skill level, however, you gain anxiety.
But too high a skill level for the challenge leads to boredom.
As Csikszentmihalyi writes, “One cannot enjoy doing the same thing at the same level for long. We grow either bored or frustrated; and then the desire to enjoy ourselves again pushes us to stretch our skills, or to discover new opportunities for using them.” He further noted how flow changes your perception of time:
One of the most common descriptions of optimal experience is that time no longer seems to pass the way it ordinarily does. The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity. . . . During the flow experience the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.
Moreover, “freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.”
I love that phrase – freedom from the tyranny of time! – and in gaining that freedom we transport ourselves, escaping the routine, shedding the mundane, exhilarating our emotions, exciting our senses, energizing our bodies, and elating our minds.
In gaining freedom from the tyranny of time, we transport ourselves.
While I’m sure there are other ways of having (and creating) transporting experiences, one other that deserves special attention is awe.
While the word originally referred to great fear (once upon a time, anything “awesome” terrified people), particularly in using the term in contemplation of God, it came to mean “solemn and reverential wonder”, an experience of smallness in the face of greatness. While I wrote above about transporting experiences taking us out of present space and time, the core element of awe is taking you outside of your self. You lose yourself in order to find your self.
The core element of awe is taking you outside of your self.
Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, studied the science of awe and wrote about in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. He defines it as: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”
Think of times you have experienced awe.
What was the setting, the time, the spark?
What thoughts sprang to mind?
How long did it last, and how long did it seem to last?
Did you feel transported?
Keltner’s book isn’t only about what he and his PhD students studied in the lab; it’s about the stories of awe he and collaborator Yang Bai (also a Berkeley professor) collected from people in 26 countries. From these stories he categorized eight types of awe, what he calls the “eight wonders of life”. In order of their frequency of appearance in the over 2500 stories collected (with multiple categories possible in each story), these awe-filled wonders are:
Moral beauty: “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming”
Collective effervescence: as found in religion and such events as “weddings, christenings, quinceañeras, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, sports celebrations, funerals, family reunions, and political rallies”
Nature: such as “cataclysmic events” and “night skies, mountains, canyons, walking among large trees, running through vast sand dunes, and first encounters with the ocean”
Music: “transporting people to new dimensions of symbolic meaning in experiences at concerts, listening quietly to a piece of music, chanting in a religious ceremony, or simply singing with others”
Visual design: such as “buildings, terracotta warriors in China, dams, and paintings” and even jewels and machines
Spiritual faith and religion: “our perennial search for nirvana, satori, bliss, or samadhi” and “classic conversion stories like that of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus”
Life and death: “how, in an instant, life comes out of the womb” or “when a person makes the transition from being a breathing physical being to some other form of existence”
Epiphanies: “when we suddenly understand essential truths about life. . . philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures. . . that change life in an instant”.
Think again of your own experiences with awe. Where would you categorize them? And scanning the categories, can you think of a time and place in your life where you experienced each one?
(If you’re like me, you usually skip these sort of thought exercises when reading. But this one is worth it. I could easily think of an awe-filled situation in each one of these categories, and it brought back not only wonderful memories, but sparked awe anew.)
Fresh from those memories, consider how Keltner concludes his introductory discussion of the eight wonders of life:
It also merits considering what was not mentioned in stories of awe from around the world. Money didn’t figure into awe. . . . No one mentioned their laptop, Facebook, Apple Watch, or smartphone. Nor did anyone mention consumer purchases, like their new Nikes, Tesla, Gucci bag, or Montblanc pen. Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling – a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.
Yes, and no.
Yes, the transporting experience of awe is the epitome of immateriality. But money and material things lie intertwined within the great majority of awe experiences, explicitly or implicitly, and economic offerings are fully a part of experiencing awe, directly or indirectly.
People purchase goods and services to, say, travel to and stay in nature (a large proportion of transformational travel is specifically designed to be awe-inducing), not to mention to protect themselves from its potential harmful aspects (sunburn, burrs, rocks, cliffs, etc.). They customarily buy musical instruments, not make them from scratch; the same with Bibles and other spiritual texts (watch out for those who make them from scratch!).
Life and death – transformative experiences for loved ones – so often happen in hospitals, with attendant bills; epiphanies arise from research, study, and contemplation in classrooms, laboratories, offices, homes, and other places, with all the acquired accouterment necessary to build up to the awe-inspiring moment of insight.
To yield collective effervescence, think of how very much money people spend on producing that perfect wedding experience, along with other rites, celebrations, and gatherings that so often yield transformations.
And new visual designs require vast sums paid to artists, designers, makers, and the like, with experiencing old ones often costing an admission fee.
Moreover, while most of the awe-filled stories you read in Dacher Keltner’s book, hear elsewhere, or encounter yourself do not arise from staged experiences per se, it is increasingly possible to design and depict awe-inducing experiences – just as with peak and flow experiences and any other experience that transports us. When doing so, the ideas and principles in the Being Intentional section below will be especially helpful.
It is increasingly possible to design and depict awe-inducing experiences.
I know scores of experience designers who work on transporting experiences, as well as fully transformative experiences. (The World Experience Organization seems to do a particularly good job of attracting them.)
One is Heather Gallagher, who bills herself as a Strategic Leader in Immersive Experiences & Transformative Events. But in Burning Man circles, Heather is known as “Camera Girl”, or “CG”, an early handle that stayed with her as she became the de facto head of technology for the annual event in the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada.
I’ve been at several presentations that Heather gave on Burning Man, as well as talked with her personally about it. She says that all burners (those who attend – make that participate in the event) say, to a person, “Burning Man changed my life”. But in fact, she makes clear, it didn’t. Not by itself, at any rate. Every year it’s a tremendous ordeal, with huge obstacles to getting tickets, getting supplied, getting there, getting set up, getting to the bathrooms, and on and on in the getting. As the WXO summarized one of Heather’s talks:
Despite all the inconveniences, burners keep coming back because it’s also a sea of miracles. They come out with stories they’ll tell for the rest of their lives, and new friends to share them with. They come back because they know that “in the most wild and unimagined of places, you can still find beautiful things.
Beautiful things like peak experiences, like flow, like awe. Like moral beauty of so many participants (particularly when things go wrong, such as the weather); effervescence collectively created; beautiful natural environs framing Black Rock City; wonderful if temporary structures, art, and performances; and epiphanies galore.
(Burning Man tells people not to make any major decisions for at least two weeks afterward.)
It’s an “ultramarathon of inconveniences”, Heather says. But “While the struggle is real, the payoff is profound.” Her payoff list consists of increased self-awareness, self-sovereignty, expanded consciousness, living more authentically, emotional growth, new behaviors, a shift in perspective, and a sense of urgency.
“Burning Man changed my life.”
But did it really?
While participants may add “I am a Burner!” to their self-identity, each one of these changes, note, are only temporary. They are transportations, not transformations – unless, that is, participants take Burning Man home with them, so to speak. To truly transform they must work on the changes they encountered and incorporate them into their lives, as Heather makes clear. Otherwise changes dissipate over time, leaving wonderful memories but little growth.
With any transporting experience, it’s what you do afterward with what happened to you contemporaneously that determines whether you will be transformed or not, and to what degree or of what kind.
Transformative Experiences
So what does it take to turn a transporting experience into a transformative one? Primarily, encapsulating the experience with three activities: preparation beforehand, reflection afterward, and integration on an ongoing basis.
Encapsulate transporting experience with three activities: preparation, reflection, and integration
Preparation involves imagining the experience before it happens, picturing its sequence of events, thinking about what it would be like, ideally even envisioning the effect it would have on you. Such contemplation before the experience engages guests in anticipating the experience, primes them to have an even better experience, and puts them in the right frame of mind, opening them up to the possibility of transformation.
Reflection happens when you look back on an experience, not just to remember it, but to ponder it, maybe to discuss it with others, always to consider its impact on you, individually. We don’t reflect on all our experiences, and companies don’t do enough to encourage, instigate, or even participate in reflection. But when it happens, it helps cement memories of our experiences, aid us in viewing them as meaningful, relive that which is transporting – and begin the process of being transformed by them.
While thinking back on any experience, reflection also enables you to simultaneously look forward. It can get you thinking about who you are in light of the experience you just encountered. It’s connecting what you experienced to your own identity, testing for a “sympathetic vibration” that resonates with who you are – and who you might become. And it can lead you then to desire change, to formulate an aspiration, even to commit to the journey of transformation. And that leads to integration.
Integration takes reflection and puts it in action. It’s where you begin working on the transformation, which often starts with an understanding of the size and nature of the gap between what you now aspire to become and where you are today. You explore various ways of behaving and being, noticing when and where you fall short – itself a re-reflection around which integration iterates – and endeavor to close the gap with each opportunity, realizing sometimes regress follows progress. Working to integrate your experiences into your life resides in a liminal place and time, and that is when people are likely to seek help – a guide who can make integration take place more effectively, more surely, and perhaps more efficiently.
Working to integrate your experiences into your life resides in a liminal place and time.
Perhaps no company takes the tripartite experience encapsulation of preparation, reflection, and integration more seriously than Explorer X, a travel design company based in Seattle.
Founded by Michael Bennett and Jake Haupert – the two of whom not coincidentally also founded the Transformational Travel Council – Explorer X is “dedicated to crafting truly epic travel experiences that have a profound and lasting impact on your life. Our ultimate goal? To inspire you to live a more mindful and meaningful life that creates positive change in your life and in the lives of those around you.”
Never merely memorable, the highly customized travel experiences Explorer X designs, books, and encapsulates for its clients – make that explorers – are meaningful at a minimum, almost always at some point transporting, and frequently transformative. As CEO Michael Bennett — who did his doctoral dissertation on transformational travel, essentially designing Explorer X — told me, “What we’ve found over the years is that, in terms of desired outcomes, most people don’t have specific goals or intentions in mind for their travel experiences before they embark. What they do know is that when they approach travel with a curious heart and open mind, something inevitably will happen along the way that invites them to consider new ideas, perspectives, and ways of living.”
Experience encapsulation is key to Explorer X’s success.
As Bennett told me, “By far the most important element of a transformative experience is the traveler’s mindset before, during, and after their adventures.”
Some explorers (usually couples) come to Explorer X specifically for a transformational travel experience, but even those without that aspiration often transform because of how the company works with them before, during, and after the experience. After booking but before the trip commences, it provides a *Mindful Travel Toolkit & Guide* to help explorers both prepare for and deepen their travel experience, and further not only asks but challenges explorers to answer these preparatory questions:
Why are you going on this Journey? What is your “Call to Adventure”?
What would you like to get out of this experience? What is your intention for this Journey?
What questions, opportunities, and/or challenges would you love clarity around?
What will you DO to make the most of this Journey?
How are you going to BE on this Journey?
Explorer X then encourages its explorers to reflect as they travel, not just waiting until the end of the trip. Ideally, they write their thoughts daily in a journal. The company then provides a Journey Reflection Guide, encouraging its use as the trip starts to come to a close, and then afterward as well. This tool explicitly elicits reflection and integration, and begins by inviting the traveler to write down a description of the trip in detail.
It then asks such reflective questions as “What people, moments, or experiences will you remember?”, “Who/what inspired you?”, and “What did you learn (or re-learn) about yourself?”, followed by three integration questions that solicit one new action, one new behavior, and one new mindset the traveler should now practice.
Explorer X’s Mindful Travel Toolkit & Guide further helps travelers reflect and integrate by guiding each one to “make sense of what you experienced, identify things you learned, and begin to take actions — big or small — that will positively impact your life, your community, and the world around you”. To help with these two all-important transformation tools it further offers support in the way of “Community conversations, mastermind groups, introductions to coaches and consultants, and loads of recommended resources and tools.”
You should similarly create opportunities for your guests to prepare, reflect, and integrate around your experiences.
Like Explorer X, encapsulate the experience with questions that would best assist your guests in turning their memorable, meaningful, and transporting experiences into fully transformative ones, determining how best you could ask those questions, get customers to answer and then act on them, and guide them through the entire journey.
For when you are able to do this – guide guests in integrating their experiences into their lives through encapsulation – you can transform your own business from being an experience stager to becoming a transformation guider.
Here’s Our Category Pirates Lens
If you're just selling stuff, you've already lost.
You just don't know it yet.
Your Superconsumers don't want your product. They don't want your service. They don't even want your "experience."
They want to become someone different.
The most valuable businesses in the world aren't in the transaction business. They're not even in the experience business. They're in the transformation business.
Where Most Companies Screw Up
They think throwing some mood lighting and a cool soundtrack on their "experience" is enough. Wrong.
Real transformation isn't about the bells and whistles. It's about the journey:
BEFORE: Prime your Superconsumers' minds for change
DURING: Create space for deep reflection (not just Instagram moments)
AFTER: Guide them to integrate these changes into their real lives
The Billion-Dollar Question
Are you designing transactions, experiences, or transformations?
Because here's what Joe Pine knows (and most businesses don't):
Transactions are forgettable
Experiences are memorable
But transformations? They're PERMANENT
Transformation is how you turn one-time buyers into lifelong Superconsumers. When you help your Superconsumers become who they want to be, you don't just make a sale. You create category evangelists who will follow you to the ends of the earth. Design your category around transformation, and you won't just have customers. You'll have disciples.
Because nobody can compete with you when you're literally changing people's lives.
Here’s how to continue to explore Joe’s work:
Arrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️
P.S. - Help like-minded pirates “think different.”
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