You and I avoid grumpy people, if we can.
However, when those grumps happen to be your prospects or clients, you better pay close attention. Why? Because they’re they are key to finding out your uniqueness for your products and services. Uniqueness seems so hard to find, but grumpy people are everywhere.
Here’s how you harness the grumbles to your benefit.
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Despite not watching much television, I still subscribe to Apple TV.
I subscribe to Netflix and Beamafilm, and I watch hours of YouTube, but I keep coming back to Apple TV.
Why do I do that? The answer doesn't lie in my behaviour alone, but drives the behaviour of tens of thousands, possibly millions of viewers. They re-subscribe, not because they want to get back to Apple TV. Instead, they're eager to watch just one series.
The name of the series is Slow Horses. The series bumps up subscriptions—and pulls back clients, like me, who've left a long time ago. Slow Horses pulls people back because it's utterly unique.
But what exactly is uniqueness?
Like any idea, it’s difficult to pin down. We tend to think of it as an inherent quality—as if some products are born unique. They’re not. Almost always, uniqueness has to be invented. Invention, as you might expect, is a costly process. How are you supposed to guess what your clients are thinking?
Usually, if you ask, you’ll go nowhere.
People don’t know what they want. What they do know is what annoys them. They’ll complain endlessly. And if you listen closely when they’re grumpy, you’ll find they’re handing you clues about what to fix—or how to stand out.
Grumpiness, it seems, is one of the smarter ways to create uniqueness.
Almost anyone can write a good story, but the great ones are where the characters come alive. For me, I needed a series where I could recognise my own family. Characters that worked with each other—but also against one another.
That messy, interlocking dynamic makes a story come alive. Slow Horses gave me that. It wasn’t Apple TV that solved my problem—it was Slow Horses. But because Apple TV gave me access to it, the platform became unique in my mind.
That’s the essence of uniqueness: it’s born from listening to frustration, then solving it in a way that others don’t.
When we step into a modern marketplace, we're swamped with dozens, sometimes thousands of options. The uniqueness—or grumpiness—gets buried under pricing and features. But they ignore one issue::what turns people into grumps?
Let's take four examples—three products and one service. And let's start with pies.
One of New Zealand's national comfort foods is a pie. Many Kiwis grow up eating meat pies at school, sporting events, or family gatherings. Classic fillings in the pies include mince and cheese, steak and cheese, chicken and mushroom, or bacon and egg. At lunch time, it's not uncommon to stop for a pie.
Yet, many Kiwis are getting grumpy about their pies.
“Well, they're not like they used to be,” said the owner, Lewis Mazza. “Pies made in New Zealand often have filler; they're not made with good ingredients.” The list goes on: Too generic tastes, mass-produced, tough, or rubbery pastry.
But what's the biggest gripe of all? It's called “butter”. Pies used to be made with a generous helping of butter. “Our pies—Rollas Pies— are exactly 50% butter”, says Lewis.
Now you'd think a statement like that would deter a diet-conscious public.
And yet it does quite the opposite. Rollas has existed since 2024. In barely a year, they've got four outlets on the go. Apparently, people felt grumpy enough to want the original buttery version of the pie.
Yes, they're grumpy about pastry, about having to deal with fillers and terrible tastes, but the butter reminds them of the past. Their biggest grumble may not even be about the butter content, but rather about how things “seemed better in the past.”
Grumpiness can apply to a quick $12 lunch purchase, but it plays an identical role in a $3 million car.
The question is: if you have endless money, why should you be grumpy? I'll tell you why. It's because your neighbour is also filthy rich. Somehow, you want to demonstrate that you're richer. To do so, you have to buy a car where you can talk about the paintwork.
Huh? Paint work?
The Lamborghini Revuelto Opera Unica sells for over $3 million. At first glance, it’s just another hypercar. But the paintwork tells a different story—a two-tone fading effect that took 475 hours of hand-painting using a spatula, with another 85 hours spent on the interior. There's no machine spraying paint on this car. It's just painstaking human attention that turns engineering into art. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can get a cheaper version of this car for a mere $608,000.
What makes it unique is the clients' grumpiness.
When you realise why they're grumbling, you can increase the value severalfold merely by something with paint. That's because you know it's not the paint you're selling. Just like the pies sold “the wholesomeness of the past”, the paintwork is signalling “I'm richer than you”, and that's what makes it unique.
However, sometimes the whole world is grumpy about the same issue, and no one seems to want to solve it.
Before I moved to New Zealand, I couldn't remember seeing a range hood in a home. Rangehoods are extractor fans. You cook, they sit above your stove top and suck out the smoke, steam, and especially the cooking odours from your kitchen.
Well, I grew up in India, and the smoke, steam, and the aroma of food were a plus. Even so, rangehoods are almost in every kitchen in New Zealand, and so reluctantly, I used it as well.
The problem with rangehoods is that you can barely have a conversation.
At high setting, it's about 70-80 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. I love listening to podcasts or music while cooking, and without my noise-cancelling headphones, I hear nothing. However, even when speaking to my wife, Renuka, I have to turn the rangehood low or off.
The Schweigen Silent Rangehoods solved this grumble in a clever way—the motor isn’t in the kitchen at all. It’s mounted outside the house. Suddenly, the kitchen becomes a quiet, social space again. The problem wasn’t “how do we make a better fan,” but “how do we stop the noise?”
Interesting, isn't it? People are continuing to grumble about noisy rangehoods, but most manufacturers continue to turn out rangehoods with features and benefits. Yet, they don't tackle the main point of contention.
Taking on the grumble is important—as you can tell.
Our marketing business started in 2000. Hence, despite being around for over 25 years, we at Psychotactics have stayed below the radar. You don't find us advertising, doing mega launches, and despite having many books, we aren't on any bestseller lists. Theoretically, this is a formula for hardship, if not a lot of uncertainty. Yet, we've thrived for decades because one of the main sources of income is the courses we do every year.
It doesn't matter if you do an article writing, storytelling, copywriting, or cartooning course.
At the very core, we're dealing with a grumpy audience. What are they upset about? Most online courses feel cold and disconnected. You log in, you watch a few videos, and you never hear from the instructor again. At Psychotactics, the focus isn’t on videos or lectures—it’s on conversation and feedback.
You’re not left alone. You post your work, you get critiques—often within minutes, and you learn from others. The grumble was “online learning is isolating.” The sales page on some other course may say “it's a cohort,” but that's just another catchphrase. You still end up feeling quite alone. On a Psychotactics course, this problem is solved very elegantly.
You not only get to know the people on the course, but you also become great friends.
You come to rely not on the teacher, but on the group. On days when you don't feel like showing up, you do so because of your colleagues in the course. On other days, when you're running at full steam, you also want to show up to bolster the spirits of your group. People learn from each other's mistakes and discover how to solve the same problem in various ways.
But is it a grumble?
Clients don't always know what they want, but they know what they don't want. The solid proof of this grumpiness doesn't show up in client comments, but instead in their behaviour. Once people get to know each other, they tend to reach the end of the course and acquire a skill. But where do you get the most dropouts? It's in the first or second week.
I want you to think about that phenomenon for a minute. The first week is when people are most eager to learn. They signed up and spent a few thousand dollars, so why bail out right at the start? The reason they do so is that they haven't formed bonds with each other.
It's easy to simply believe that you're not so good at something and quietly leave. It's much harder to leave once you realise that everyone wants you around, needs you, and you need them.
The uniqueness becomes the effort of the group.
Or as an African proverb says: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. People are constantly looking for a group of friends. Smart, interesting people, a bit like them, but also opposites of each other.
This uniqueness isn't the reason why people join a Psychotactics course.
But it's the primary reason why they come back. We also know this fact to be true, because if they join another course and the group isn't as vibrant as the one they'd experienced, the clients complain. Our job, therefore, is to pay attention to this grumpiness and make sure they never feel alone.
Grumpy people are everywhere.
Whether it’s a silent kitchen, a pie, a hand-painted car, a spy series full of flawed characters, or a course that actually talks back to you—uniqueness always starts the same way: by listening to complaints and solving them better than anyone else.
If you want to find uniqueness, start listening to grumpy people 🙂
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