The promise that powers growth | The CEO Magazine

Ask most leadership teams to describe their ideal customer and you’ll get a demographic: mid-market, B2B, based in a particular region, in a particular revenue band. Ask them what they promise that customer that is clearly valuable and different to competitors and the answers are often a murky shade of gray.

That gap, between who we think we serve, why we think they choose us and what we know beyond doubt to be true is where great strategy lies.

Michael Porter made the case three decades ago in his Harvard Business Review essay ‘What Is Strategy?’ Operational effectiveness, doing what everyone else does but slightly better, is necessary but never sufficient because it’s too easy to copy.

“The essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match,” he wrote.

Or in plain terms: you’re either the best at something or the cheapest. Everything in between is a slow, hard slog approaching a commodity.

Know your core customer jobs

You cannot develop a truly differential competitive position and hold it without a genuinely deep read on your customer. Not just any customer. What Scaling Up calls your core customer: the one you wish you had a thousand more of.

That means not everyone who buys from you, but the customer to whom you are truly valuable, who buys again without being chased, refers you without being asked and pays what you’re worth. Get enough of those customers and the profit takes care of itself.

At a certain size and stage, it’s easy to lose touch with core customers through success, not neglect. A bigger customer base, a larger organization and more distance between the customer and leadership.

It’s built into how customer intelligence has traditionally been gathered. A survey once a year. A round of calls after a launch. Perhaps some ad hoc customer feedback makes it to the strategy meeting. A market research firm brought in ahead of a rebrand.

From that single exercise, a leadership team builds personas, based on who they think their core customers are. Usually by buying behavior or sorted by demographics so the media buy can be planned smarter, sometimes by broad psychographics.

A photograph, not a video

Two things go wrong from there. First, those cohorts miss the point. Customers don’t buy products, according to Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen. They hire them to do a job. That job is rarely just functional – it’s emotional and social too.

Known as core customers’ Jobs to Be Done, Christensen’s own example was a McDonald’s milkshake whose sales had not increased despite many efforts to influence growth.

Examining sales data only gets you so far. Through observation and direct customer dialogue, they learned the real job of a McDonald’s milkshake was to break the boredom of a long commute. Turns out the milkshake did that job better than any other snack so they added a lid to to reduce spills.

Two people can buy the same product for entirely different reasons and demographic profiles and sales data will often never tell you that.

Second, and just as costly: that intelligence is frozen in time on the day it’s collected, like a photograph preserving a memory. As trends change, competition pops up, nuances in customers creep in, generations retire, a survey completed two years ago tells a leadership team nothing about whether this year’s strategy is effective or whether forces outside their control are reshaping the core customer.

Take the fitness market, a US$131 billion market (2025) projected to grow between six and nine percent per annum. The core customer of commercial and boutique gyms is changing. Gen Z adults (18–24-year-olds) make up more than 50 percent of all new gym memberships.

Is the ultimate job to be done changing? Not really. We want to stay fit and healthy, lose weight and build strength. But are there differences between home gym and commercial gym users. Jobs like space-saving, machine durability, delivery and confidence in the process matter to home gym users, not necessarily commercial gym members.

So how do you maintain clear differentiation among constant evolution?

From intelligence to promise

Knowing your core customers is only half the equation. The other half is what Scaling Up calls the brand promise – one of seven key decisions in laying out a business strategy according to Scaling Up’s framework.

Scaling Up Founder and author, Verne Harnish, is blunt about it: offer a unique brand promise and be so good at it that customers won’t care if you’re bad at everything else. A well-known example is the Domino’s promise: ‘If it’s not delivered in 30 minutes, it’s free’. The brand promise that grew Domino’s to the largest pizza delivery chain in the world over a decade.

The brand promise needs to be compelling enough for customers to change behaviors. For this reason, it is often drawn from the most important jobs to be done by your core customers – transcending basic customer expectations common to all players in the industry.

A brand promise isn’t a slogan. It’s a specific, ideally measurable, commitment that your core customer can hold you to. Each promise is measured and made visible so that the whole business sees how it is doing each day, week, month at delivering on it.

This is where continuous and accurate customer intelligence shines. Without deep customer intel, a brand promise is a guess or a wish dressed up in a marketing message, with little basis or proof to back it up, set once at a strategy off-site and rarely revisited. These types of promises are likely to be ineffective at driving growth.

It also protects a leadership team from a subtler trap: polishing operations while strategy drifts into the shades of gray zone, becoming less and less different from competitors or alternative in the eyes of your core customers.

What changes in the age of AI

The need to deeply understand your core customers and how their expectations are evolving is nothing new. However, the speed and accuracy of that intelligence is exponentially improving. This is where AI changes the equation, not by replacing judgment, but by ending the guesswork.

Understanding the Jobs to Be Done behind a core customer used to mean a slow, expensive, possibly once-a-year exercise to gather data. Today the same intelligence can be gathered every day, from sources most leadership teams already own and rarely mine: sales call transcripts, customer interviews, support and care emails, chat logs.

Unstructured, messy, human language. Exactly the data that used to be costly to analyze at scale. Exactly where the real Jobs to Be Done live, because customers describe what they’re actually trying to achieve far more honestly in an enquiry call or support ticket than in a survey checkbox.

The shift isn’t only speed. It’s the ability to triage, continuously, whether every change a business makes – in product, messaging, sales focus or delivery – is attracting more of the right core customers.

Proof from the field

We’re watching this play out inside companies implementing Scaling Up. Since commencing Scaling Up, a fitness company working with me has automated the intelligence loop on thousands of real customer conversations.

Using AI tools such as large language models and simple scripts on structured data like sales orders and unstructured data sources like sales call transcripts, they can quickly identify their core customers against hundreds of categorical data points. Now eight months in, an unexpected bonus has surfaced: the ability to see in almost real time how their core customer base is changing over time as an outcome of their own initiatives.

They used to know what people bought. They now know why they buy and, more importantly, what their most valuable customers look like. Just as importantly, they also know what their unprofitable customers look like and how to address them.

Leadership reflects on these updates quarterly as part of their Scaling Up sessions with me. They’ve used these insights to set priorities around major decisions like range rationalizations and sharper content strategy, speaking to their core customers actual pain points, motivations and Jobs to Be Done.

Three steps to building powerful brand promises

None of this requires a data science team or a seven-figure AI budget to start.

1. Pick one customer data source already in the business; for example, sales call transcripts, support tickets or onboarding interviews. Use AI to mine it for the language customers use to describe their circumstance and what they’re actually trying to achieve. That’s raw Jobs to Be Done data.

2. Retest the core customer definition against it. Are the top Jobs to Be Done crystal clear? Can customers be grouped by their top jobs? And are we clear which jobs we can and will deliver on?

3. Write, or rewrite, up to three brand promises that can be validated with core customers using Scaling Up’s one-page brand promise tool.

From indiscriminate to intelligent scaling

Strategy was never about having the best tech or even the most data. It’s about having the right intelligence to make decisions about where to focus and how you will play that’s different.

AI now speeds this up. It offers Scaling Up companies powerful data to make strategic decisions previously only afforded by larger businesses. It surfaces customer intel that was previously invisible or time-consuming to analyze. It can help close the loop by measuring outcomes of daily, weekly initiatives aimed at improving delivery of their brand promises to customers. The difference between intelligent and indiscriminate scaling is now readily accessible to scale-up leaders.

Want to put this to work? Book a discovery session with a Scaling Up Coach.