Which brings me to the real question. What do brands owe their customers? What do they really owe them? Not the old line about the customer always being right. What lengths should a brand go to in order to keep people happy? And where’s the point where trying to make everyone happy actually makes things worse?
If I could work my will.
Ebenezer Scrooge says that. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on their lips should be boiled with their own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through their heart.
Harsh words. But until he’s visited by three ghosts, he’s a harsh man. What interests me even more is the shape of the thought itself. If I could work my will. The little spark that comes right before the wish. You hear it and recognize it because it lives in all of us. It’s that quiet feeling that if the world would just hand you the controls for a minute, you could straighten out a few things.
It shows up everywhere. Someone at work does that one thing that drives you up a wall. A place you love would be perfect except for the tiny detail they never fix. Even strangers in the wild chew too loudly, drive too slowly, or insist on pushing the elevator button twenty times as if that’ll encourage it if I could work my will. Then the wish follows.
Personally, if I could work my will, all those grocery items that come with that little peel-off film wouldn’t have the peel-off film. You know the one. It never comes off right. It tears at the corner or refuses to lift at all. And you stand there with your fingers slipping around, pretending you’re one good grip away from victory. But you’re not. Most times, I grab a knife and stab it enough to qualify as a culinary felony, but only after I’ve spent an hour trying to peel the damn film off. The size of the knife and the number of stab wounds directly relate to how long I’ve been at it. I once tried to peel the film off a frozen mac and cheese, and I’d been fighting it so long the thing melted. At that point, I took an axe to it. Not a normal escalation, but it felt earned.
Now, if I wrote to that mac and cheese company and said, Hey, cool it with the film covering the product, I know they wouldn’t write back. And I know they’re not going to stop putting the film on the damn thing. It’s part of the process and part of the design. I can work my will in my kitchen. I can’t work it in their packaging department.
Which brings me to the real question. What do brands owe their customers? What do they really owe them? Not the old line about the customer always being right. What lengths should a brand go to in order to keep people happy? And where’s the point where trying to make everyone happy actually makes things worse?
The impulse to work our will
Scrooge may have said it out loud, but he wasn’t the first to feel it, and he’s definitely not the last. That little itch to edit the world shows up in everyone. You don’t even have to be angry. Sometimes it’s mild. Sometimes it’s quiet. You walk through your day and catch yourself thinking, If I ran this place, the line would move faster. If I designed this lobby, the chairs wouldn’t feel like medieval punishment devices. If I were in charge of this whole operation, things would finally make sense.
It’s not about ego. It’s about longing for a version of life where the friction points disappear. All the tiny moments that poke at you would smooth out. The person ahead of you at the coffee shop would know their order before they reached the counter. The meeting that should’ve been an email would simply be an email. The world would feel a little less messy, a little less crowded, a little more shaped to your liking.
And it’s funny how quickly those thoughts show up. You can walk into a store with no agenda at all, just trying to grab a loaf of bread, and within thirty seconds, you’re redesigning the entire floor plan in your mind. Move the dairy to the front. Put the carts somewhere that doesn’t create a traffic jam. Stop pretending the checkout lanes are a lawless zone where no one understands how lines work. If you could work your will, this whole thing would run like a calm, civilized dance instead of whatever it is now.
People do this everywhere. You do it. I do it. It’s part of being human. We bump into flaws and immediately imagine a cleaner version of the moment. It’s a quiet fantasy of control in a world where most of us don’t have much. We don’t get to redesign airports, restaurants, or grocery stores. Most of the time, we don’t even get to redesign our own commute. So the wish lives inside us, mostly harmless, until it meets something that truly gets under our skin, like the peel-off film on a frozen mac and cheese that refuses to behave.
These wishes aren’t random. They come from real feelings. Annoyance. Inconvenience. Confusion. Lost time. Moments where a little more thought could’ve made our lives easier. The wish feels natural because the frustration feels natural. If I could work my will is really just another way of saying this could be better.
And that’s where this whole conversation starts. People carry around tiny, private edits they wish brands would make. Not sweeping changes. Not reinventions. Just small improvements that make a product or experience feel like someone cared about the details. You could call it nitpicking, but I don’t think it is. It’s the human wish for things to line up the way they should.
But the moment you bring brands into it, everything gets more complicated. Because wanting something is one thing. Expecting a company to change how it operates because of your personal preference is something else entirely.
Where personal frustration meets brand reality
There’s a moment when your private little wish stops being just a wish and starts feeling like a genuine grievance. You stare at the product, the service, whatever it is, and think, Come on. You had one job. That’s where the impulse to work your will bumps into the wall of how the world actually works.
That mac and cheese film is my personal wall. I look at it and think, Someone made a choice here. Someone in a room said, Yes, put that impossible film on the top. Don’t worry, the customers will figure it out. And maybe they were right. Maybe most customers peel it off without a thought. Maybe I’m the only one who ends up sweating over a frozen meal like I’m trying to break into a high-security vault. But in that moment, I don’t care about maybe. I care about the feeling that the people who made this thing didn’t consider the part where an actual human being has to open it.
We all have that moment with some brand. Not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s tiny. The shampoo bottle that never fully drains. The restaurant app that forgets your order history. The pair of scissors you need scissors to open. You hit one of those points, and you feel a little spark of irritation rise up. It’s not world-ending. It’s just one more instance where a product or service makes your life harder instead of easier.
And that’s usually when the wish turns into a thought. I should tell them. I should say something. Surely if they knew this part of their product made people miserable, they’d fix it. You imagine writing an email, leaving a review, or sending one of those polite customer service messages that start with, "I love your product, but..."
But here’s the thing. Most people don’t send the message. And the ones who do almost never hear back. You know this. You know that writing to the mac and cheese company won’t result in a new film-free design. The odds of a corporation rebuilding its packaging because I had a bad night with a frozen dinner feel pretty slim.
And that’s when the question starts to form. Not the fantasy one about boiling people with pudding. The real one. What do brands actually owe us? How far should they go to remove frustration for the people who buy from them? Should they chase every complaint? Should they weigh them? Should they ignore them unless thousands of people shout at once? Should they overhaul things that technically work but could be better? And who decides what better even means?
This is the moment where our personal wishes run into the practical limits of a business. We want them to care. We want them to listen. We want them to treat our frustration as a signal instead of background noise. But we also know they live in a world of constraints, costs, processes, and reasons we never see.
So the simple little wish starts turning into a bigger thought. Something a lot more interesting. Something every brand has to wrestle with if it wants to keep the people it serves.
What does a brand truly owe the people who choose it?
The myth of total customer satisfaction
Somewhere along the way, brands got sold on the idea that they’re supposed to make everyone happy. Not just most people. Everyone. As if a successful company is one that creates a product or service so flawless that no one, anywhere, will ever have a single complaint. It’s a nice dream. It’s also impossible. People are too different. Needs are too different. Patience levels are too different. There’s no world where every customer walks away satisfied in the same way.
But brands still try. They bend. They stretch. They twist themselves into shapes that make no sense. They read every review like it’s scripture. They chase every comment because someone, somewhere, said they didn’t love the experience. The result is usually a mess. A watered-down product. A service that used to feel clear but now tries to be all things to all people. A brand that forgets what made it good in the first place.
It’s a strange kind of panic. As if the worst thing a brand can imagine is a customer not getting exactly what they want. But here’s the thing. The effort to please absolutely everyone is the fastest way to lose the people who actually matter. The people who came to you for a reason. The people who liked the way you solved a problem. The people who accepted that no product is perfect, but this one came pretty close.
Trying to satisfy everyone is like trying to run a restaurant where every dish has to please every palate. No spice because some people hate spice. No dairy because some avoid dairy. No gluten because that’s a problem for others. No meat because someone will complain. By the end, you’re serving a bowl of air. And even then, someone will say the air tasted better last year.
Yet brands still fall for the myth. They picture the customer who writes a long, emotional complaint and assume that person represents a silent army. They imagine that one preference is secretly universal. So they adjust. They redesign. They rebuild. And half the time, they break the very thing that made the product worth choosing.
The truth is simpler. Not everyone needs to be thrilled. Not everyone needs to agree. A brand’s allowed to have a point of view. A way of doing things. A process that works even if not everyone loves every part of it. That doesn’t make the brand careless. It makes it focused.
Yes, customers matter. Their needs matter. Their frustrations matter. But there’s a difference between listening and shape-shifting. Listening says, We hear you. Shape-shifting says, We’ll contort ourselves into whatever you want so you won’t leave us. One builds trust. The other builds chaos.
And this brings us closer to the real heart of the question. If brands can’t please everyone, and trying to do so only weakens them, then what should they actually do? What should they aim for instead? What’s the commitment that keeps customers without turning the brand into a frantic people-pleaser?
What brands owe customers. Not everything. Not perfection. But something more grounded and more honest.
What brands truly owe their customers
So if brands can’t make everyone happy, and they shouldn’t twist themselves into a circus act trying, then what do they actually owe the people who buy from them? What’s the real responsibility? Because it’s not nothing. Customers aren’t expecting miracles. They’re expecting something simpler and a lot more reasonable.
First, a brand owes people clarity. Tell me what the thing is. Tell me what it does. Tell me how to use it. Don’t bury simple information behind walls of marketing language. Don’t make me guess. Don’t make me hunt around like I’m trying to solve a puzzle. Clarity is respect. It says, We made this. You deserve to understand it.
Second, a brand owes consistency. Not perfection. Not a spotless record. Just the sense that if I choose you today, I won’t feel like I’m meeting an entirely new company tomorrow. People don’t mind hiccups. They mind unpredictability. Nothing erodes trust faster than a product that behaves one way one week and an entirely different way the next.
Then there’s the basic promise. The thing the brand says it’ll do. It owes customers that promise. Not more. Not less. If you make a frozen mac and cheese that’s supposed to get hot, it should get hot. If you make a drill, it should drill. If you run a hotel, the room should be clean, and the door should lock. Simple things. Honest things. You don’t need a mission statement carved in stone to deliver on them.
A brand also owes people thoughtful design. Not luxury. Not beauty. Thoughtfulness. The kind of design that considers the human being who’ll actually use the thing. The person with cold hands in a grocery aisle trying to peel a film. The person in a rush who needs a button to work the first time they press it. The person who just wants whatever they bought to feel like it came from someone who tested it in the real world, not someone who nodded through a meeting while thinking about lunch.
And finally, a brand owes people communication that treats them like adults. Not chirpy language that pretends we’re best friends. Not corporate apologies written by committee. Not vague updates that explain nothing. Just talk to people plainly. Tell them what’s happening. Tell them why it’s happening. Tell them what they can expect. Most customers will accept almost anything if they feel informed instead of being managed.
These aren’t extravagant demands. They’re the foundations of trust. When a brand offers clarity, consistency, thoughtful design, and honest communication, customers feel taken care of even when things aren’t perfect. They feel seen. They feel considered. And that’s worth more than getting every wish granted.
Because people aren’t actually asking for total control. They’re not expecting the world to bend to their private list of improvements. They just want to know the brand put in the effort. That someone cared enough to think through the details. That their experience mattered at least a little.
And once a brand delivers those fundamentals, something interesting happens. Customers stop looking for perfection. They stop treating every inconvenience like a betrayal. They start giving the brand the benefit of the doubt. Because the relationship begins to feel like a real one instead of a transaction held together with tape.
Which sets up the next question. If brands owe customers these core promises, then how do they decide what to change and what to hold firm? How do they tell the difference between listening and losing themselves entirely?
Where the line is between change and conviction
The tricky part for any brand is knowing when to bend and when to stay planted. It’s not always obvious. Every piece of feedback comes wrapped in emotion. Some people are furious about something tiny. Some people are calm about something serious. Some people want a brand to reinvent the entire product because they had one bad morning. Others will quietly suffer through a flaw for years and never say a word.
Sorting that out takes judgment. And judgment takes conviction. A brand has to know what it stands for and what it’s trying to deliver, or every complaint starts to look like a call to action. That’s how you end up with brands that panic the second someone raises a concern. They scramble. They adjust. They fix things that didn’t need fixing. They create confusion where there used to be clarity.
But good brands listen differently. They listen with a filter. They look for patterns, not isolated sparks. If ten thousand people say the lid’s impossible to open, that’s not nitpicking. That’s a signal. If one person writes a novel about how the product should come in chartreuse, that’s a preference. A brand with conviction can tell the difference.
Conviction isn’t stubbornness. It’s not the brand saying, We do things our way, deal with it. That’s just ego dressed up like confidence. Real conviction is more grounded. It says, Here’s the problem we exist to solve. Here’s the way we solve it. Here’s what we value. Here’s what we’ll always protect in the experience. Everything else we can look at. Everything else is open for discussion.
That’s the balance. A brand should never be so rigid that it ignores real friction. But it should never be so flexible that it becomes a shapeless, agreeable blob. People don’t choose blobs. They choose something that feels intentional. Something with edges. Something with a point of view.
When a brand knows what matters most, it can make smarter choices about what to change. It can find the difference between a frustration that breaks trust and a frustration people can live with. It can improve without losing itself. And customers can feel that. They may not be able to explain it, but they sense it. They can tell the difference between a brand that cares and a brand that’s just trying to avoid trouble.
And this is the sweet spot. Customers don’t want total obedience. They want thoughtfulness. They want a brand that pays attention but doesn’t panic. A brand that keeps its shape even as it grows. A brand that listens without dissolving into whatever the loudest voice demands.
Once a brand figures out that balance, it stops chasing approval and starts building trust. And trust lasts longer than any quick fix meant to quiet someone down.
Which leads us to the next point. There’s a difference between making people happy and being a brand people trust. One’s fleeting. The other’s durable.
The difference between making people happy and being a brand people trust
There’s a moment every brand hits where the temptation to make people happy becomes very strong. Someone’s upset. Someone had a bad experience. Someone left a dramatic review full of adjectives and wounded pride. The instinct is to jump in and fix it all. Smooth it over. Patch the hole. Make the person happy, so the problem disappears.
But here’s the thing about happiness. It’s temporary. It shifts. It moves. It depends on a thousand tiny factors a brand can’t control. A bad day at work. A slow checkout line. A missed package. A film you can’t peel off the top of a frozen mac and cheese. Happiness comes and goes whether the brand does anything or not.
Trust is different. Trust has weight. Trust sticks around. Trust grows slowly but stays steady. A customer can be mildly irritated and still trust a brand. They can roll their eyes, curse the packaging, and still throw the product in their cart the next week without thinking twice. Happiness wobbles. Trust holds.
The brands that understand this stop chasing smiles and start pursuing something deeper. They aim for reliability. They aim for honesty. They aim for experiences that feel considered, even when they’re not perfect. They know a customer who trusts them will forgive almost anything except feeling ignored or manipulated.
You can see the difference in how these brands respond to problems. They don’t rush to create a brand-new version of a product because one person said it should be green instead of blue. They don’t apologize for things that were never broken. They don’t pretend every complaint is breaking news. They look at the situation with a clear head and ask the real question. Does this issue break the promise we made?
If the answer’s yes, they fix it. Quickly, quietly, without drama. If the answer’s no, they acknowledge the concern and stay the course. No spinning. No theatrics. Just a steady hand. And customers pick up on that steadiness. Even when they disagree with a choice, they respect the sense that someone’s steering the ship with thought instead of fear.
When a brand builds this kind of trust, everything gets easier. Customers stop nitpicking every detail because they know the brand’s doing its job. They stop expecting perfection because they know perfection’s not the point. What they want is someone who shows up consistently and communicates clearly. Someone who’s not bending the entire operation because one person’s having a moment.
And this brings the whole conversation full circle. People don’t actually want brands to grant their every wish. They want the brand to know what it’s doing. They want the brand to have a spine. They want the brand to take their experience seriously without treating every suggestion like a command.
A brand that chases happiness burns itself out. A brand that builds trust earns patience, loyalty, and, occasionally, forgiveness for the films that still refuse to peel.
The takeaway
Scrooge thought the world would be better if he could work his will. Most of us don’t go that far, but we understand the feeling. We’ve all got a tiny list of improvements we’d make if the universe handed us the controls. A smoother line here. A better lid there. A mac and cheese package that doesn’t require a knife, a prayer, and a small act of violence to open.
But that feeling only takes us so far. At some point, our personal wishes crash into the reality of how brands and businesses actually operate. They can’t build the world to each individual preference. They can’t chase every whim. They shouldn’t even try. The real responsibility is simpler and much more human. Give people clarity. Keep your promises. Design with care. Communicate like you respect the person on the other end.
When brands do that, they build trust. And trust’s what people really want. Not perfection. Not obedience. Not a custom version of the product designed around their latest annoyance. They want to feel like the brand understands its job and takes their experience seriously. Once that foundation’s there, everything else becomes manageable. Even the moments where the film still refuses to peel.
At ThoughtLab, this is the heart of how we guide brands. Not toward a world where they chase approval, but toward one where they earn trust. Where their choices feel intentional. Where customers stick around because the brand knows what it stands for and shows it in the way it shows up. You can’t work your will on every detail, but you can build something people believe in.
