Knowing Your Customer Means Knowing Who’s Been Dissatisfied (and for How Long)

The Super Bowl halftime moment wasn’t a sudden cultural rupture.

It was the visible result of something that’s been accumulating quietly for years: different people experiencing the same cultural moment through very different histories of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

When an alternative appeared alongside the official Super Bowl Halftime Show, much of the commentary rushed toward production quality, politics, or intent.

That misses the more useful question:

What expectations were already in the room before the music even started?

Markets don’t react in the abstract. They react through people with memory.

Most People Weren’t Evaluating, They Were Participating

For many viewers, the halftime show isn’t something to be judged in real time.

It’s part of a ritual.

People are gathered. The TV is already on. The moment is social, not analytical.

In that context, the underlying desire isn’t alignment or meaning. It’s continuity.

Their mind says, “Stay inside the shared experience without friction.”

People might enjoy it.
They might dislike it.
They might joke about it afterward.

But irritation in moments like this is usually shallow. It doesn’t accumulate. It doesn’t demand action.

Default behavior wins because it asks nothing of the viewer.

Dissatisfaction Doesn’t Appear Overnight, It Accumulates

At the same time, not everyone walks into moments like this with a neutral history.

Some people have felt misaligned with mainstream cultural signals for a long time, not because of one performance, but because of repeated patterns they’ve noticed over the years.

That dissatisfaction is rarely loud at first.

It shows up as disengagement, as quiet frustration, and with the sense that certain moments simply aren’t meant for them.

Over time, that feeling hardens, not into outrage, but into expectation.

Expectation that the world should look different. and that public culture should reflect something they recognize themselves in.

This is where tension forms.

This Is True on All Sides

This dynamic isn’t confined to one ideology, faith, or political orientation.

It appears wherever people carry long-standing expectations about how the world should recognize them, and where those expectations have gone unmet for long enough to matter.

Puerto Ricans offer a clear example. Puerto Ricans are Americans, U.S. citizens living in a U.S. territory. They do not need a passport to travel to the mainland United States. They fight and defend freedom in the Armed Forces. And yet, culturally and politically, many have lived with a quiet contradiction: belonging without full inclusion.

That tension doesn’t always surface loudly. Most of the time, it exists as background dissatisfaction felt more than spoken. Over time, it shapes how people interpret cultural moments, national narratives, and public recognition. When acknowledgment finally appears, it often feels overdue rather than novel.

Whether dissatisfaction comes from faith, identity, geography, culture, or history, the mechanism is the same:

People respond to the present through the accumulation of prior experience.

When Expectations Are Projected, Disappointment Becomes Chronic

For some, religious conviction and political identity are deeply intertwined. Cultural moments aren’t just entertainment; they are read as signals about moral direction.

In that framework, disappointment isn’t aesthetic, it’s existential.

The issue isn’t belief itself. The issue is projection.

When a sacred moral framework is unconsciously placed onto a pluralistic, unconverted culture, disappointment becomes constant. Each mainstream moment becomes another reminder that the world does not share the same premises.

A pluralistic, unconverted world was never going to act holy.

That gap between expectation and reality creates long-term dissatisfaction, because the world is being asked to meet a standard it can never uphold without a Savior.

Why Alternatives Suddenly Make Sense

When dissatisfaction has been present long enough, people don’t need persuasion.

They need acknowledgment.

An alternative doesn’t have to argue its case when it speaks to something already felt. It doesn’t feel like a choice; it feels like relief, but not relief from entertainment. Relief from dissonance.

That’s why alternatives don’t emerge randomly. They appear where dissatisfaction has already done the work.

And Why Many People Never Move at All

There’s also a large group that sits between comfort and conviction.

They notice misalignment.
They feel occasional frustration.
They’re aware of alternatives.

But not enough to disrupt continuity.

For them, switching still feels harder than staying. The tension hasn’t crossed the threshold where action feels necessary.

So they remain because the cost of movement still outweighs the cost of staying put.

The Real Lesson

One of the most clarifying shifts is realizing that people aren’t reacting to the same moment; they’re reacting to the history they bring into it.

My goal here isn’t to say who is right or wrong, but to simply show how expectation and emotional history fuel choices, and how marketers use them. Don’t be exploited.

And if you are a founder reading this, know that simple demographics and watered-down customer profiles won’t scratch the surface when they make first contact with a potential customer.

Some people want shared continuity.
Some want recognition.
Some aren’t ready to move either way.

Knowing your customer means understanding:

• what they expect the world to be

• how long they’ve been disappointed that it isn’t

• and what they’re already prepared to do differently

When you see that clearly, it becomes harder to reduce people to caricatures and demographics and easier to understand why the same moment can feel unremarkable to one person and deeply personal to another.

That’s customer discovery.