Roy's Blog: September 2026
September 10, 2026
Your Customers Are Telling You Everything. You’re Watching the Wrong Things
BE DiFFERENT Unfiltered™
The Sacred Cow Burial™
Business is full of accepted beliefs.
Some deserve to be buried.
This is one of them.
🐄 This Week’s Sacred Cow
🎯 ”Target Customers by What They Use.”
For decades, marketers have been taught to understand customers by studying what they buy, what they own and what they use.
Products.
Services.
Purchase history.
Demographics.
Industries.
Company size.
The assumption is simple.
If you know what customers use, you’ll know how to sell to them.
The problem is…
Products don’t explain people.
They only tell you what customers have already done.
They don’t tell you what they value.
They don’t tell you why they choose one company over another.
They don’t tell you why they’ll happily pay a premium for one brand while ignoring another.
For years I’ve argued that businesses should stop obsessing over customer needs and start understanding Customer Cravings™.
Why?
Because needs are functional.
Cravings are emotional.
Needs get you into the game.
Cravings determine who wins.
If understanding products, demographics and purchase history was enough, every company serving the same market would perform the same.
They don’t.
Some become extraordinary.
Most become ordinary.
The difference isn’t what customers use.
The difference is understanding why they choose.
That’s where traditional marketing falls apart.
⚖️ Sacred Cow Verdict
Guilty.
Tracking what customers use explains yesterday.
It doesn’t explain preference.
It doesn’t explain loyalty.
It doesn’t explain competitive advantage.
🪦 Sacred Cow Sentence
Bury it.
Stop building customer profiles exclusively based primarily on products, demographics and purchase history.
Those things describe customers.
They don’t explain them.
🚀 Sacred Cow Replacement
Stop Building Usage Profiles. Start Building Reward Insights™.
Instead of asking:
* What products do our customers use?
* What have they purchased?
* Which demographic do they belong to?
Start asking a different question.
What do our customers consistently reward?
Every Like.
Every Share.
Every Save.
Every recommendation.
Every repeat purchase.
Every premium price willingly paid.
Every referral.
Every reward leaves a clue.
Collect enough of those clues and patterns begin to emerge.
Those patterns become Reward Insights™.
The organizations that win tomorrow won’t simply collect more customer data.
They’ll build the capability to generate Reward Insights™.
Those insights will reveal opportunities competitors never see.
They’ll change how organizations understand customers.
They’ll change how organizations compete.
That’s an Audacious Move™.
And it may become your greatest source of competitive advantage.
Different Wins.
Another Sacred Cow Buried.
Bury it. Replace it. BE DiFFERENT.
🪦 Ready for the Next Sacred Cow Burial?
Thursdays I challenge accepted business beliefs that limit leaders and organizations.
If you’re ready to think differently, follow the BE DiFFERENT Unfiltered™ series.
✋ Continue the Conversation
🎙️ Listen to my podcast, Audacious Moves™ to a BILLION where I reveal the decisions that transformed a startup into a billion-dollar business.
📖 Read more insights at: BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 9.10.26 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
September 7, 2026
BEHAVIOUR. REVEALS. CRAVINGS.
BEHAVIOUR. REVEALS. CRAVINGS.
Understanding what customers truly crave starts with watching what they actually do, not simply asking them what they want.
🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week
Discover Reward Signals™. Discover What Customers Truly Crave.
Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.
I hope it helps you create yours.
🤔 We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question
For decades businesses have studied what customers buy.
What they use.
What they say they need.
Useful?
Yes.
Enough?
No.
Those things tell us WHAT customers do.
They don’t necessarily tell us WHY they do it.
If you want to discover what customers truly CRAVE, I think we’ve been looking in the wrong place.
🧬 Watch What Customers REWARD
Every day customers leave clues.
Likes. Shares. Saves. Recommendations.
Premium purchases. Repeat purchases. Referrals.
I call them Reward Signals™.
Reward Signals™ are the traceable behavioural DNA customers repeatedly leave behind.
One signal means very little.
Repeated signals create patterns.
And that’s where it gets interesting.
🔍 Turn Reward Signals™ Into Reward Insights™
Don’t just collect the signals.
Discover the patterns inside them.
Those patterns become Reward Insights™—strategic intelligence about what customers consistently value.
Those insights can reveal something far more powerful:
Customer Cravings™.
The process:
Reward Signals™ → Reward Insights™ → Customer Cravings™ → Unique Value → GROWTH
That’s the opportunity.
💡 Same Product. Different Cravings.
Imagine two customers buy the same luxury watch.
Traditional marketing might put them in the same segment.
Now study what they repeatedly reward.
Customer A rewards entrepreneur stories, leadership, innovation and high performance.
Reward Insight™: Achievement + Growth.
Possible Customer Cravings™: Progress. Achievement. Significance.
Customer B rewards luxury travel, designer brands, exclusive experiences and prestige events.
Reward Insight™: Status + Exclusivity.
Possible Customer Cravings™: Recognition. Prestige. Belonging.
Same watch.
Completely different cravings.
🚀 Turn Discovery Into Business Growth
Once you understand what customers crave, everything can change.
Your value proposition.
Your customer experience.
Your offers.
Your pricing.
Instead of designing around what customers use, you can create unique value around what they reward.
Don’t study transactions. Discover aspirations.
That’s where growth opportunities competitors may never see are hiding.
🎯 What’s Your Next Audacious Move™?
Stop asking only:
“What are our customers buying and using?”
Start asking:
“What Reward Signals™ are they repeatedly leaving behind?”
Then look for the patterns.
Discover the Reward Insights™.
Uncover the Customer Cravings™.
And create something around those cravings that nobody else does.
Discover what others never see.
That’s how you become The ONLY One™.
🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?
🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.
They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 9.7.26 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
