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
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