Advantage doesn’t come from louder messaging. It comes from sharper customer insight.

These 5 questions help CEOs turn what customers value into a clear, defensible market position that drives pricing power, strategic focus, and long-term growth. A practical framework for strategy sessions, boardroom decisions, and a narrative that investors, employees, and teams can repeat.

I’ve spent more than 20 years sitting in nearly every seat around the growth table, as an agency founder, a VP at a Fortune 500 company, CMO for mid-market, a board director, and now a fractional CMO for B2B companies navigating inflection points. I've recognized a pattern. The companies that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the well-funded campaigns. It’s the ones whose leadership teams have a disciplined, repeatable habit of turning what customers value into strategic decisions.

These five questions are the ones I bring to every engagement. They turn customer intelligence into a clear, defensible market position that drives pricing power, strategic focus, and long-term growth. More importantly, they create a narrative that investors, employees, and customers can all repeat.

1. What are the unmet needs of our best customers?

This is the question that unlocks everything else. When you truly understand the unmet needs of your most valuable customers, you can see where to command premium pricing, grow your share of their business, or create entirely new revenue streams.

I learned this early in my career during a seven-year partnership with a major industrial manufacturer of commercial hygiene solutions. We began by mapping the everyday challenges their customers faced and identifying where existing solutions fell short. Those insights reshaped not only how hygiene solutions were marketed but also how the value of commercial restroom dispensing systems was communicated to facility managers, balancing hygiene standards, operational costs, and user experience.

Gartner’s 2025 Enterprise Growth Agenda Survey reinforces that organizations that invest in deeper voice-of-customer initiatives consistently outpace competitors in revenue growth.

2. How do our customers perceive us versus the alternatives they consider?

Perception is a leading indicator of future revenue mix. Relying on high-level brand trackers that tell you whether awareness went up or down is not enough. You need to understand how key accounts and segments describe you compared to the direct competitors and alternatives they’re evaluating.

At a global technology company, I led the repositioning of their digital experience platforms. One had been perceived as a traditional web content management system. But the customers they wanted to win, enterprise marketers building personalized, data-driven experiences, didn’t see it that way. We had to reposition the product from a legacy CMS to a multichannel engagement platform and launch a companion customer-insight tool that transformed real-time data into experience improvements. That repositioning became possible only after we mapped the perception gap.

How do your key accounts describe you versus direct competitors? Use data from win/loss analysis, NPS verbatims, and social or behavioral signals, not just a brand tracker study.

3. Where do we create value that competitors can’t (or won’t) match?

A unique value proposition only matters if it’s hard to copy and important to your customers’ buying decisions. This is where many marketing teams get stuck. They articulate differentiation that sounds good internally but doesn’t hold up in the market. Find 2-3 concrete proof points (results, speed, risk reduction, or experience) that would be costly, slow, or a poor strategic fit for competitors to match.

I’ve seen this play out when I repositioned a national rehabilitation hospital specializing in the recovery of patients with catastrophic injuries. The brand platform was built around the deeply personal concept of reclaiming your life after a life-changing injury. That wasn’t just a tagline. It was rooted in a very specific competitive truth. This organization’s combination of clinical expertise, patient outcomes, and family-centered culture was genuinely unmatched. Competitors could offer rehabilitation services, but the depth of experience and patient outcomes would be costly for others to replicate. That positioning expanded their national awareness and patient acquisition.

4. What is the real customer experience, and where are we losing trust or momentum?

Customer feedback shouldn’t live only in a quarterly NPS report. It should cover the entire journey, from first contact to renewal or repeat purchase, and your leadership team should know exactly where the two or three make-or-break moments are.

This is something I focus on intensely. When I partnered with a health benefits SaaS, we mapped the entire employer journey through health benefits enrollment, a process that was notoriously confusing and friction-heavy. The positioning we developed centered on simplifying that journey, and reflected a real commitment to removing specific friction points identified through direct customer and broker feedback. That clarity drove the brand story, the new site, and an integrated campaign. Focus on the moments that matter most for revenue. Where you win or lose deals, where you create promoters, and where you can remove friction or build on strengths.

5. Which market shifts play to our strengths, and how are we reallocating resources accordingly?

Trends only matter when they lead to strategic bets. I’ve watched too many companies chase market shifts that sound exciting in a board deck but don’t align with what they’re built to win. I worked on positioning a smart home automation platform for a leading HVAC manufacturer. We identified early that the convergence of climate control systems and IoT was a shift that played directly to the manufacturer’s engineering credibility and dealer network. We didn’t try to compete with consumer-first smart home brands. Instead, we built the launch strategy and channel positioning around a specific advantage: the trust that homeowners and professionals already placed in the parent company for climate control, which extended into a connected home ecosystem.

Make customer insight a strategic asset, not a marketing project

When CEOs and CMOs use these five questions in business reviews, board meetings, and strategy sessions, customer insight stops being a slide in a marketing deck and becomes a core strategic asset, the kind that drives alignment across the C-suite and gives investors, employees, and partners a clear, repeatable story about where you’ll win next and why others will find it hard to keep up.

Every organization has an anthem. A unifying idea that connects purpose, performance, and people. The CEOs who find it and build their strategy around it are the ones who stop competing on noise and start competing on clarity. This is the work I do at Brand Anthem. I help B2B companies at inflection points (new investment, acquisitions, stalled growth) define a Strategic Growth Narrative that connects customer insights to positioning, go-to-market execution, and the marketing infrastructure that drives it.

Victoria Jones is the founder of Brand Anthem, a fractional CMO and marketing strategy firm serving mid-market, private-equity-backed, and founder-led B2B organizations. With more than 25 years of experience spanning technology and SaaS, healthcare and life sciences, industrial and manufacturing, professional and enterprise services, financial services, retail, hospitality, food service, education, government, and nonprofit sectors, Victoria brings strategic clarity, creative vision, and operational discipline to organizations navigating growth and transformation. She partners with leadership teams to modernize marketing, align brand and revenue strategy, and build scalable systems that translate insight into measurable business impact.