demand-leadership
Demand Leadership
Overview
The highest-value market position is not to fulfill demand but to define it — to become the entity whose framing of the problem the customer adopts as their own. Three stages: 1 — Insight Generation ("this vendor understands my problem better than I do") → 2 — Value Reconstruction ("this vendor has redefined how I think about it") → 3 — Scene Creation ("I go to this vendor before I decide, not after").
Stop-rule: Stage 3 = customer asks your opinion before deciding. Cross-skill: use after customer-relationship-ladder + jobs-to-be-done; alongside north-star-metric; instead of first-principles for positioning tasks.
When to Use
Use when: customers evaluate on price/features; sales driven by customer-initiated RFPs; strong product losing to weaker competitors with stronger "thought leadership"; no distinctive problem framing competitors don't share; new market entry or post-PMF commoditization risk.
Do NOT use when: commodity markets with regulation-fixed problem definitions; pre-Stage-1 companies with no customer intelligence; consumer mass markets (use social-proof + anchoring first).