Every company collects complaints, and most companies treat them as a cost of doing business. Ticket opened, refund issued, ticket closed. What companies rarely do is read their record of complaints as a dataset. Instead, the case is closed and disposed of, along with more commercial opportunities than most product roadmaps ever create. Ian Stewart, Chief Marketing Officer and part of the founding team at STOKE Shoes, has built a company on the opposite premise. After close to 30 years in marketing and brand building, with roles at Converse, UGG, TOMS, Xcel Wetsuits, MTV, and Coca-Cola, he argues that the complaint a category continues to hear and ignore is not a service problem at all. It is a business plan, already validated, sitting unclaimed in customer service logs.
The Pattern is the Product
The discipline Stewart describes is not about listening harder. It is about learning to separate noise from repetition. “One person struggling to find a sneaker that’s comfortably wide enough is an inconvenience,” he says. “Thousands, if not millions, of them saying the same thing over years is a market.” The distinction matters because most companies measure complaint severity rather than complaint recurrence. A single furious customer with a large following triggers an escalation. A steady, unremarkable murmur of the same mild frustration, repeated across a decade, triggers nothing, because no individual instance clears the threshold for attention.
This reasoning is backwards, and it explains why entire groups of customers go unserved inside mature categories. “The signal is in the pattern, not the volume of any single voice,” Stewart says. Volume is loudest at the point of greatest emotion, which is normally a one-off failure. Patterns are quiet by definition, made of people who long ago stopped expecting the industry to fix anything and simply adapted. Stewart’s instruction is to go looking for them where they have naturally organized themselves: “Go and find where those people are already talking to each other.” Forums, communities, and comment threads are where adaptation becomes visible. In footwear, the underserved group was never hiding. A lot of American men have wide feet, and the industry has been telling them to make do for decades. The complaint was free, repeatable, and available to any competitor willing to treat it as a brief rather than a nuisance.
You Cannot Scale Your Way Into a Different Shape
The moment a company recognizes an underserved group, the reflex is to stretch the existing product to cover it. It is cheaper, faster, and does not require rebuilding anything. It also produces a compromised object that confirms every suspicion the neglected customer held. Stewart is blunt about the limits of the approach. “Trying to scale up a shoe originally designed for narrow performance lasts and elite athletic pursuits ultimately delivers the wrong shape,” he says. The geometry was set by an assumption made long before the new customer entered the conversation, and no amount of sizing up changes the assumption underneath.
The alternative costs more upfront and pays back in a way marketing cannot manufacture. “We started with how larger feet actually work, then designed forward from there,” Stewart says. Designing forward from the actual constraint, rather than backward from an existing mold, is the difference between a variant and a product. It also shortens the sales argument to nothing. “That difference is felt the moment someone puts the shoe on.” That sentence is a commercial strategy disguised as a product note. When the difference registers physically and immediately, the company is no longer paying to persuade anyone. It is paying only to get the product into the customer’s hands, which is a far cheaper problem to solve and one that compounds through word of mouth in a way paid acquisition never does. Businesses built on stretched products carry the opposite burden forever, spending against a gap the customer can feel.
Naming the Customer Does the Work
Marketing to a long-ignored group tempts brands into indirection. They gesture at inclusivity, widen the imagery, soften the language, and hope the right people recognize themselves. Stewart considers the hedge a wasted opportunity. “When a group has been overlooked for a long time, naming them directly does most of the work for you,” he says. Directness carries information that atmosphere cannot. It tells the customer someone looked at their specific problem, built for it deliberately, and is prepared to be judged on that basis. Vagueness tells them the opposite, that they are being swept into a broad campaign written for somebody else.
There is a credibility mechanism beneath this that most brand teams underrate. “Speak plainly about who you built this for,” Stewart says. “That clarity earns trust faster than any campaign built on aspiration.” Aspiration works when a customer has no evidence to check it against. An overlooked group has nothing but evidence, years of products that did not fit and promises that did not hold, and that experience makes them expert at detecting hedged language. Plain speech is verifiable. It invites the customer to test the claim, which is a risk only a company with a genuinely different product can afford to take. Aspiration asks for belief; specificity offers proof, and the second is far harder to imitate.
Stewart’s framework runs on material that companies already own and routinely discard. “Complaints are free research,” he says. “The ones that keep coming back are telling you where the gap is.” The cost of the insight is zero. The cost of ignoring it is the category’s next competitor.
Connect with Ian Stewart on LinkedIn for more insights on brand building, product development, and identifying underserved markets.
