The business of dissatisfaction

Success!

Is there a more coveted destination? In life, in career, in business?

In business, it represents selling more and growing value, in career it is being ambitious and climbing up the ladder and in life, it is the collection of social trophies that prove your worth to a watching world.

In reality, success is the most elusive destination. More like a mirage. And the world has been conditioned to chase it. Those who chase it are celebrated universally. By culture, capitalism, advertising, social media and even parents.

Because what are you, if not successful?

A failure.

But what if the opposite of success is not failure?

This binary definition of success is the root of the problem, because it relies on always wanting more.

The problem with ‘More’

More responsibility. More recognition. More sales. More wealth. More market value.

The bedrock of success is wanting more. But the problem with more is, nothing is ever enough. In fact, we have turned hunger into a virtue. Look at the language of contemporary success: hungry, relentless, ambitious, never satisfied, growth mindset, scale, hustle, 10X, disrupt, dominate.

A founder who says, “I'm happy with what I've built” can sound less impressive than one saying, “We're going to 10X this.”

We actually celebrate dissatisfaction, as a measure of success.

This obsession with ‘more’ is partly why dissatisfaction has been institutionalised, weaponised and commercialised for economic gains.

It manifests across contexts and is a vicious cycle. While the most visible and easily understandable context is individual ambition, there are many more, with far larger implications.

Business:

Business doesn't merely want “more.” It needs more.

A company can be profitable, have happy customers, employ people well and generate sufficient returns, yet be described as underperforming because growth has slowed. Even one of the most influential frameworks in business strategy, the BCG Growth-Share Matrix, institutionalised growth as a dimension of business success. A high-share, high-growth business was a “Star”; a high-share but low-growth business was a “Cash Cow”, valuable, profitable and cash-generative, but no longer where the future lay. In fact, investors punish mature businesses for slower growth.

Simply put, in business “not growing” has become synonymous with “not succeeding”.

Since business needs more growth, it triggers the need for more demand. Passing the baton to Marketing.

Marketing:

Marketing has historically operated by identifying a gap between what people have and what they could have. And advertising helps highlight that gap to induce feelings of lack or dissatisfaction.

Whiter teeth. Younger skin. Bigger house. Better car. Better career. Better body. Better holiday. Better version of yourself.

The reality is, we are in the business of making people feel dissatisfied and triggering desire for more. But how does a brand sustain desire?

New and improved, 20% extra, more comfortable, new features, now foldable…

Advertising comms are mostly relative to what you already have. Even if you own the last best product from the same brand. There is always the next better thing, the next better symbol of ‘You have arrived’ if you own this.

So, what is success in marketing?

Not stimulating demand, but stimulating dissatisfaction.

Not creating value for the consumer, but extracting it.

Marketing doesn't make the consumer successful. It makes the business successful, and calls that a shared success.

Individual:

Today, the markers of individual success go far beyond career and income. Social currency, visibility, appearance, productivity and self-optimisation have become measures of how well we are doing at life.

No wonder an entire ecosystem of “success enablement” has mushroomed around us. The wellness industry, productivity industry, self-improvement industry and even personal branding industry increasingly sell us the same message in new packaging:

You are not enough yet.

And so, the individual who wants to be successful becomes the consumer who wants more, driving consumption, fuelling business growth, giving marketing a reason to create more desire.

And the self-reinforcing economic cycle begins again.

So, what does success look like if we break the cycle?

Success doesn’t need to be stuck in binary. It doesn’t need to be measured by a single parameter – ‘More’. It is multi-dimensional, relative and circumstantial. Each of us could and should own our personal measure of success.

For me, it could be internal fulfilment rather than external validation.

For you, it could be lived experience rather than projection.

For someone else, it could be a journey, not a destination.

And a business could choose it to be value creation rather than value extraction.

Maybe we don't need to invent an alternative definition of success. We could look back to our own cultural vocabulary. Devdutt Pattanaik's interpretation of Indian mythology offers an alternative definition of success: contentment.

Contentment is not the failure to want more. It is the refusal to let ‘more’ define you.