The Anatomy of Wow
Wow is one of the most overused words in business. And yet I keep coming back to it.
Despite the frequent clichéd abuse of the word, it turns out that almost none of us have been taught how to wow.
TL;DR: The Anatomy of Wow
The Anatomy of Wow reverse-engineers the positioning of iconic leaders. It identifies three core elements — Core Promise, Audience Avatar, and Signature Move. The analysis identifies three universal patterns: leading with inclusion over demographics, building on emotional tension rather than product features, and creating an ownable ethos that becomes the business differentiator.
We sit through marketing seminars and business courses that tell us to define our unique selling proposition. And then we spend weeks — sometimes years — trying to explain why our shoes are better than other shoes. Better laces. Better stitching. Better soles.
But Nike didn’t win with better shoes. They won with three words. Just Do It.
And here’s what most people miss — that slogan wasn’t just a tagline. It was the externalization of Phil Knight’s vision for what Nike stood for. The wow wasn’t the product. The wow was the belief system behind the product.
🧩Free Download 🧩
Simple Strategic Plan
Ready to Grow Your Business? The (R)Evolution Roadmap is a modern strategic planning framework that distills strategy into four catalytic pillars — Roadmap, Reputation, Results, and Rhythm. The result? A simple strategic plan that drives clarity, confidence, and growth.
By downloading this guide, you’ll join hundreds of subscribers who receive my weekly newsletter with tips on strategy, AI, and building what’s next. View the Simple Strategic Plan for more info.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
What is Wow?
Oxford Languages defines Wow as a “sensational success.” And that really nails it.
As consumers, we don’t want to work with people who say “Meh, I’m pretty good at what I do. I think.” We work with people who promise us, “I’m going to rock the heck out of your world.”
Not just in words, but in actions, in beliefs. In everything they do. But how does that manifest itself?
So I asked AI to help me analyze successful business leaders to see if I could reverse engineer the anatomy of wow.
You have a wow. You just haven’t been taught to identify yours.
– Monica Poling
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
The Framework
For each leader, I looked at three elements:
Core Promise — What do they deliver? This is the rational layer, the item they sell.
Audience Avatar — Who are they selling to? Not just as a demographic, but as a person in a specific emotional state.
Signature Move — What is the one ownable, specific belief they have? The thing they do that nobody else does quite the same way? This is where the wow lives. And it’s the element most people skip entirely when building their business.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
The Leaders
Sara Blakely (Spanx)
Core Promise: Products designed by a woman for women that solve the real problems women have — not the problems men think they have.
Audience Avatar: Women who immediately recognize when a product was made for them.
Signature Move: Blakely tells her origin story — the pantyhose she cut the feet off of, the patent she filed herself, the cold calls she made — constantly and consistently. The founder IS the brand, and her struggle is the proof that she’s one of us.
Brené Brown
Core Promise: Vulnerability is not weakness — it is the birthplace of courage, creativity, and connection. Living wholeheartedly is both the goal and the strategy.
Audience Avatar: The high-achieving professional who has built armor around themselves and suspects, quietly, that the armor is costing them more than it’s protecting them.
Signature Move: She took a word the business world was actively avoiding — vulnerability — and made it the center of a leadership framework. That linguistic pivot changed the conversation. Nobody else owned that word. Now no one else can.
Mark Cuban
Core Promise: The game is rigged — and if you understand how, you can beat it, build on it, or blow it up entirely.
Audience Avatar: The scrappy, skeptical entrepreneur who distrusts conventional wisdom, smells a bad deal from across the room, and wants permission to trust their instincts.
Signature Move: In a class of billionaires defined by inaccessibility, he made himself radically reachable — answering DMs, funding strangers, showing up without handlers. The accessibility isn’t PR. It’s a value system made visible. And in his peer group, that contrast alone is the differentiator. When every other billionaire is building walls, Cuban is leaving the door open. That’s not niceness. That’s a philosophy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist)
Core Promise: The universe is not distant or intimidating — it is the most thrilling story ever told, and you are made of the same stuff as stars.
Audience Avatar: The curious person who was told science wasn’t for them — too hard, too cold, too abstract — and who secretly always thought, “What’s beyond?”
Signature Move: He makes the cosmos personal. In a field defined by distance and abstraction, he consistently brings it back to the human experience. You don’t just learn about supernovas — you feel a sense of beloning. That emotional bridge between the infinite and the intimate is entirely his own.
Scott Harrison (charity: water)
Core Promise: 100% of public donations go directly to clean water projects — full stop, no exceptions, no overhead taken from public giving.
Audience Avatar: The skeptical donor who wants to give but doesn’t trust that their money will really reach the people it’s meant to help.
Signature Move: The 100% model, funded by a separate pool of private donors who cover all operating costs. He didn’t just say “we’re trustworthy.” He built an architecture that makes trust verifiable. And then he told the story with stunning visual storytelling that made donors feel the impact personally.
Blake Mycoskie (TOMS)
Core Promise: Every purchase is an act of generosity — you don’t have to choose between buying what you want and doing something good.
Audience Avatar: The conscious consumer who wants their spending to reflect their values but doesn’t want to sacrifice quality, style, or convenience to do it.
Signature Move: He made the giving model the product. Buy One Give One isn’t a marketing campaign bolted onto a shoe company. It is the shoe company.
Howard Schultz (Starbucks)
Core Promise: A third place — not home, not work — where everyone belongs, and the experience is consistent. The coffee is almost beside the point.
Audience Avatar: The urban professional who needs a reliable refuge, a place to think, meet, or simply exist outside the demands of their two primary worlds.
Signature Move: He imported the Italian espresso bar experience and democratized it for America. The language — grande, venti, barista — creates a small initiation ritual that makes regulars feel like insiders. Belonging is manufactured, deliberately, through vocabulary.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
The Anatomy of Wow
After reviewing the above examples, three patterns clearly stood out
They all lead with inclusion.
When you look at what draws people in, it’s never a demographic — it’s the feeling of being seen. Every marketing course will tell you to start with your ideal customer profile. Age, income, job title, pain points. And yes, each of these leaders has a clear audience. Brené Brown didn’t target “high-achieving women with imposter syndrome.” She resolved a human tension — the exhaustion of pretending to be invulnerable — and millions of people across every demographic responded. The avatar is implied by the emotion, not the other way around. Start with the feeling. The right people will self-select.
Products are rational, but customers buy based upon emotion.
Scott Harrison delivers clean water infrastructure. Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about space dust. These are not inherently emotional products. And yet every single leader on this list found the human tension underneath the transaction and built their positioning from there. The water isn’t clean water. It’s trust restored. Astrophysics isn’t about particles flying through space, it’s about wonder and exploration. Emotion is not the domain of consumer brands and lifestyle creators. It is the universal language of leadership.
The person behind the product is the differentiator
What separates everyone on this list isn’t what they sell. It’s how they talk about what they do in a way that uniquely intertwines them with their business. Brené Brown’s linguistic pivot on vulnerability. Blake Mycoskie’s structural buy-one-give-one model. Scott Harrison’s 100% architecture. Mark Cuban’s open door in a world of closed ones. In every case there is a specific, ownable, hard-to-copy ethos — a framework or philosophy that becomes the business differentiator. Their wow is an approach that nobody else does quite the same way.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
So What Does This Mean for You?
Here’s the thing about every leader on this list. They have something most of us don’t — marketing teams, communications directors, brand strategists, and PR firms working around the clock to ensure their message stays consistent, visible, and aligned with their wow.
For the rest of us, it’s just us.
Which means we have to be more intentional, not less.
Look back at the three patterns. Every one of these leaders leads with a feeling, not a feature. Every one of them found the human tension underneath what they sell and built their positioning from there. And every one of them has a specific, ownable ethos that nobody else does quite the same way.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a blueprint.
This is counter to what many of us believe, especially those of us in B2B and B2G. “My customers already know I’m good. I don’t need to be a rockstar.”
Tell that to Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. With customers who are firmly cargo logistics professionals, Maersk still leads with the adventure of global trade, not tonnage capacity. Firefly Aerospace competes in a sector where the engineering absolutely speaks for itself, and they still lead with audacity and mission.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
The Bottom Line: We All Have a Wow
If the most technical companies in the world know that expertise alone doesn’t win hearts, what does that tell the rest of us? Wow matters.
The good news? You already have a wow. You just haven’t been taught to identify yours.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
Key Takeaways
- Wow is a strategy, not a just a feeling. It is a definable, reverse-engineerable positioning approach used by the world’s most recognized leaders and brands.
- Every wow has three elements. A Core Promise (the rational layer), an Audience Avatar (a person in a specific emotional state), and a Signature Move — the ownable belief or approach that nobody else does quite the same way.
- Emotion drives decisions in every market. Even in technical, B2B, and institutional contexts, the most successful leaders find the human tension underneath the transaction and build their positioning from there.
- Demographics describe who. Emotion describes why. Start with the feeling your customer is already having — the right people will self-select.
- The differentiator is never just the product. It is the specific, hard-to-copy ethos the person behind the product embodies and makes visible.
- Expertise alone does not win hearts or markets. Even the most technical companies in the world know that engineering specs and credentials are table stakes, not differentiators.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿
Work with Me
Ask the
Expert
Turn your organizational knowledge into your biggest business asset
Most businesses have incredible expertise — but that knowledge is buried in emails, documents, and people’s heads — their website barely scratches the surface. That gap quietly costs leads, sales, and trust. Ask the Expert turns your expertise into a 24/7 AI-powered search engine and knowledge base.
Data on Tap
AI-Generated Biz Tools
Imagine how AI can visualize your expertise (and collect leads)
Data on Tap is a growing collection of AI-powered intelligence visualization tools that turn your knowledge into an interactive playground — data visualizations, calculators, and more. Using AI, you can build most of these tools in an afternoon. Follow along as I show you how. (Or contact me to build one for you.)
AI Workshops for
Organizations & Teams
Practical AI for better decision making.
AI is reshaping every industry — but most of today’s training focuses on tools. My interactive sessions start with strategy – where is your business feeling friction and how can you use AI to organize, share and monetize your knowledge. Customizable for large and small groups.
Speaking &
Keynotes
Start with your Unfair Advantage
Most businesses can’t track where their revenue actually comes from — or where it’s quietly leaking out. These keynotes and sessions show audiences how to map their revenue, close the gap between strategy and execution, and use AI as a real thinking partner along the way. You leave with frameworks you can deploy Monday morning.
🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿 🌿