Creating a Customer: How to Stand Out in a Lookalike Contest
Your competitive advantage when efficiency has become a commodity
The best way to win a market is to create your own. The best way to create a market is to create a customer.
In this issue:
1. The Customer-Axis Framework
2. Efficiency as a Commodity
3. Customer creation
4. CEO Uncomfortable Questions
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“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
Peter Drucker
“The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.”
Theodore Levitt
In late December, I sent my clients holiday greetings and asked them about the biggest challenges they faced as CEOs that I helped them overcome.
I received many various answers, so I had plenty to mull over while opening the champagne. Yet, business growth was the note that rang clearest through all of them.
Every CEO must deliver business growth, but the conditions are usually far from comfortable:
1. Competition is fierce. Businesses struggle against international behemoths on one hand, and audacious startups on the other.
2. Most businesses don’t have the luxury of ‘throwing things at the wall and see what sticks,’ as their R&D budgets are finite.
3. Old ideas have run out of steam, and new ones are nowhere in sight.
This resonates deeply with my own experience from when I was a CEO ten years ago. Your board expects you to deliver skyrocketing growth while, of course, saving every single penny.
Since 2016, when I left my cozy office to run my own consulting firm, I have been honing my methodology — The Customer-Axis Framework: Designing for Inherent Growth.
For a deep dive, you can access the full Manifesto via this link, or check out the key takeaways at the end of this post.
Throughout 2026, I’ll be sharing the key insights of the methodology, diving deep into every core pillar. Stay tuned.
I’ll also be publishing several mini books on these key topics. They will be complimentary for paid subscribers and founding members.
We’ll be diving deep into the following areas:
1. Customer Creation: How to make competition irrelevant.
2. Designing for Inherent Growth: Turning customer value into the axis of your business.
3. Growth Metabolism: How to turn growth from a project into a process.
4. Navigational Principles and Habits: How to stop forecasting and start navigating.
5. The No-Strategy Approach: Why traditional planning blocks growth—and what to replace it with.
We’ll begin with Customer Creation. Let’s dive in.
Efficiency as a Commodity
If you don’t turn customers into your patrons, your competitors will turn them into theirs.
In the 19th century, it was said: “God created men, but Samuel Colt made them equal.” With a Colt Peacemaker in their pocket, even a frail individual could protect their family from a hulking, beefy brute.
AI is set to become the ‘Colt Peacemaker’ of the business universe. Once the world is done playing with deepfakes and goofy AI images, it will become clear that AI’s real role is as the ‘Great Equalizer.’ It allows a small firm to match the efficiency of a corporate behemoth.
As a result, efficiency will cease being a competitive advantage in many industries.
Unlike the 20th century, technology today democratizes faster than it evolves. Fifty years ago, technology followed a slow, linear path: it was refined for years, then remained the exclusive domain of a privileged few, and only then trickled down to the mass market.
In 2022, LLMs were made available to everyone while still in their infancy. They hit the mass market before they learned to draw a human with exactly five fingers.
In a world where machines grow smarter, efficiency becomes a commodity.
The only way to stand out in this lookalike contest is to stop fighting for someone else’s customers and start creating your own.
Creating Customers
Chasing competitive advantage is like trying to be more attractive to your spouse than their lovers are.
You need to create your own customers. I call such customers ‘patrons.’ As always, you should begin with customer needs.
When in doubt—dive into customer needs.
Customers have needs—it goes without saying. But not all needs are equal.
Imagine you need to drive from point A to point B. If your tank is empty, you’ll look for a gas station.
· You know what you need (fuel)
· You know where you can find it (gas station)
This is what we call ‘demand.’
Demand is always tied to a specific product. If you need a laptop, you aren’t looking for a tablet.
When a company sells you fuel at a gas station, it fulfills an Explicit Need (Demand) with an Old Solution.
In markets where players fulfill Explicit Needs with Old Solutions, companies don’t compete on the products themselves—they’ve already become commodities. Instead, the battleground shifts to service and convenience. Take gas station density, for example.
Some companies fulfill Explicit Needs with New Solutions. In Dubai, for example, the gas station comes to your parking lot in the form of a mobile refueling truck. Foldable smartphones follow the same logic—a new way to deliver familiar value.
Businesses who aim to build their own categories address Underlying Needs. The difference between Underlying and Explicit needs is that customers don’t realize they have the former until these needs are met.
For instance, we didn’t know we needed to stay connected on the go until Motorola introduced the first mobile phone.
By the way, Henry Ford completely misread the insight behind his own ‘horse’ joke. He was asking about Demand. If he’d looked for Underlying Needs instead, he would have heard the word ‘faster’ loud and clear.
Some companies fulfill Underlying Needs with Old Solutions. Take the vinyl revival: the market is growing, even if it’s a fraction of its former size. Today, vinyl is like foie gras for music connoisseurs—they insist they can hear the difference and look down on anyone who can’t.
But businesses that aim to create their own customers, or Patrons, try to meet Underlying Needs with New Solutions.
To create a customer is to open their eyes to both the problem and the solution. If a customer walks away with your product wondering, ‘How did I ever live without this?’—voila. You haven’t just made a sale; you’ve created a Patron.
Nespresso, YETI, Lululemon, Airbnb, Liquid Death, Spanx, Dropbox, Starbucks, Facebook, Keurig, Chubb, Sleep Numbers, OpenAI, Red Bull, Spotify, IKEA and many others created their own customers—and profited handsomely from it.
Some identified Underlying Customer Needs intuitively; others relied on thorough research. Many of my clients have done the same, even if their companies aren’t yet global household names.
Customer creation is about solving a problem the consumer didn’t know they had, through the power of innovation.
Before Dropbox, we didn't know we wanted to store files in the cloud. Before Spotify, we didn't know we wanted to stream music. And before Airbnb, we hadn't realized we wanted to stay in strangers' homes—or rent out our own.
TiVo, GoPro, Palm—these companies also managed to create their own customers, but they did it only once. They were like some pop artists who recorded only one massive hit.
Peter Drucker said: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Paraphrasing Drucker, I say: “The only way for a business to thrive is to keep creating customers and to transform the organization itself so that this creation becomes a continuous, self-sustaining metabolism.”
We’ll dive into Growth Metabolism in two weeks.
Identifying Underlying Needs—those that are non-obvious and unconscious—and designing New Solutions for them is the only way to stand out in the ‘lookalike contest’ of the 21st century’s second quarter.
Business growth is impossible without new customers. But can we really call them ‘customers’ if they are ready to switch to a competitor tomorrow without a second thought? The real question is: How many true Patrons does your company actually have?
The logic of Underlying Customer Needs and the mechanics of Customer Creation run deep. We will continue deconstructing this territory in the upcoming editions. Stay tuned.
CEO Uncomfortable Questions
1. Are you offering your clients Old Solutions or New Solutions?
2. Are your current products built upon a profound understanding of Underlying Customer Needs?
3. Are you merely servicing existing Demand, or do you truly understand the drivers behind your customers’ behavior?
4. Is your organization creating its own customers, or is it simply “renting” them from the market?
Conclusion
By relying on ‘competitive advantage,’ you are merely ‘borrowing’ customers from the market.
The very word ‘advantage’ implies comparison with competitors, creating a framing that biases the mindset of both your customers and your team.
Only the continuous process of customer creation makes those customers truly ‘yours’ and delivers the growth that shareholders expect from the CEO.
Next week we’ll delve into myths about ‘demand’ and ‘market’ in more detail.
Read also: What Would Socrates Ask You About Your Business Strategy?
The Customer-Axis Framework Manifesto: Key Takeaways
There is only one way to build a successful business: first, create a customer; second, establish Customer Value as the axis for every process, asset, and decision.
Creating your own customers—Patrons—allows a company to transcend competition and focus entirely on its own evolution.
If your organization is built to solve for the customer, your own success becomes the inevitable byproduct.
Inherent Growth isn’t a project; it’s a process.
Customer creation drives growth and scaling. The more patrons a company creates, the larger it becomes. Scaling is not a goal; it is a consequence.
As environments evolve and solutions are replicated, a company must constantly reinvent itself to sustain its ability to create the customer.
Great article.
This presentation was very insightful. Thank you so much!