Why this idea means business : We explore the unexpected power of surprise in marketing. Learn how to find the surprise sweet spot to supercharge your brand. Read this for ideas about marketing surprise.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To use surprise more effectively in your marketing. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – Innovation
- Skill area – Psychology | Creativity | Marketing
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. monthly purchases from innovation adoption = +65
- Est. sales increase = +$6.5k (monthly) | +$78k (annual)
Marketers often use the term “surprise and delight” to talk about what they do. But while delighting customers seems obvious (would you ever do the opposite?), surprising them is a trickier concept. After all, not everyone likes surprises.
Plus, you’d be surprised how little most marketers know about surprise and how it works. Which, unsurprisingly, means most brands rarely deliver a good marketing surprise.
So, let’s fix that by starting with what surprise is.
What is surprise?
Surprise is one of the 6 core human emotions, according to psychologist Paul Ekman. (The others are joy, sadness, fear, anger and disgust).
It’s how the brain reacts to an unexpected event by focusing attention on the cause and consequences of that event.
The amygdala in the brain’s emotional system quickly assesses how to best respond to the threat level of the surprise.
A mugger with a knife. A redback spider in the bathroom. Some gammon-faced chud wearing a One Nation T-shirt. In these bad surprise cases, the amygdala’s fight-or-flight response kicks in. It releases a rush of adrenaline, turning into either aggression to fight or speed to take flight.
This is usually not the type of marketing surprise you want your brand to create. There’s no delight for you or the customer if your brand gets into a fight with them or makes them run away.
On the other hand, a good surprise triggers a positive response. A lottery win. Getting a bonus at work. Free shots in a drinks promotion at the pub. These make you smile and think more favourably towards who or what created that surprise. That’s the type of marketing surprise you want.
The power of marketing surprise - Grab attention
You may like to think that you’re aware of everything going on around you all the time.
However, that’s really not the case. Most of the time, our brains run on autopilot mode, with most of our decisions and actions based on routines and habits.
Ever get to work and realise you can’t remember anything about how you got there? Or find yourself grabbing a chocolate bar at the checkout, even though that’s not what you went in to buy.
In this mode, your conscious, logical brain is on power-save while your emotional and instinctive brains handle your routine decisions.
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, and Slow calls this routine brain activity System 1 thinking. Subconscious automatic choices in familiar, everyday situations where the outcomes are mostly known and predictable.
This is your brain being energy efficient. The more focused, conscious System 2 thinking, when you think hard about something, requires more brain power. For example, when you’ve done an exam or had to concentrate through a long meeting, how do you feel afterwards? Exhausted, right? That’s because your logical brain has burnt up lots of energy.
(See here for more on System 1 and System 2 thinking)
Surprise customers by being different
System 1 thinking in marketing favours market leaders. They want customers to repeat-buy their usual, familiar brand without thinking. That holds their position as the market’s habitual choice.
However, for smaller, underdog brands, the challenge is to get customers to think more about their purchases, rather than buy on habit.
To do that, they first need to grab customers’ attention. And the key to attention is surprise. Doing something unexpected makes people notice you.
An example of this is a psychological phenomenon called the Von Restorff effect. It suggests that our brains expect to see patterns. But when something breaks a pattern, it catches our attention.
For example, A,B,3,D,E.
You notice the number first because it breaks the pattern of the letters, right?
Some examples of how this can work in marketing :-
- make an unexpected advertising claim – e.g. Avis’s famous 1960s “We’re Number Two, so we try harder”.
- make your packaging and price point differ from the category norm – e.g. Voss premium bottled water.
- add or remove part of the customer experience – e.g. allocated seating when flying with budget airlines to make flights cheaper.
The power of marketing surprise - Be more interesting
Doing the unexpected to get a customer’s attention is a good start.
However, if you don’t keep their attention, it won’t lead to them actually doing anything. A car alarm going off grabs your attention. But unless it’s your car, you’ll ignore it. It won’t hold your attention.
To hold someone’s attention, you need to be interesting. You have to make them curious by opening up a knowledge gap.
You do this by giving them a new and relevant piece of information that they hadn’t known before. It’s also about how you share that information. To be surprising, it has to be done in a way that’s :-
- original – i.e. it hasn’t been done before.
- memorable – i.e. it will stick in their heads.
- shareable – i.e. it’ll make them want to tell their friends about it.
Surprise customers with creativity
Creative thinking and the creative process is how you make your ideas original, memorable and shareable. You put a surprising twist on what might be a familiar idea for customers, so that they experience your brand in a new way. This makes it more likely that they’ll remember your brand and talk about it with their friends.
For example, the product demonstration is a common advertising technique.
You show someone using the product. But kitchen appliance company Blendtec put a fun marketing surprise twist into how they did this by putting surprising items into their blender and asking, Will It Blend? These included iPhones, golf balls, a crowbar and The Mandalorian Season 2.
You’d never expect to put any of these in a blender. But the surprising act of doing so led to them getting millions of video views on YouTube and getting a huge surprise boost to their sales.
You don’t want your ideas to be dull. But if you choose the same predictable route as everyone else, they will be. Bright ideas surprise customers. Differing from what others have done before makes you interesting.
The power of marketing surprise - Finding the sweet spot
Here’s the challenge, though. It’s possible to go too far with surprise in marketing. Remember the amygdala from earlier? The fight-or-flight response. If you overdo your marketing surprise, the amygdala takes over, and customers get angry or afraid. That’s not what you want, unsurprisingly.
What you want is to find the marketing surprise sweet spot. The right level of surprise so that you’re familiar enough not to trigger the amygdala, but original enough to be interesting and different.
The design world calls this the MAYA principle, named by iconic 20th-century designer Raymond Loewy. He argued designs should be the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Most Advanced means Surprising. Yet Acceptable means Familiar.
It’s explored further in Derek Thompson’s book Hitmakers, which shows how this MAYA sweet spot can apply to other categories too. For example, MAYA can be used to explain many pop culture crazes, from French Impressionist painters to the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll. These all had familiar elements, but were given a surprising enough twist to help them take off.
The surprise sweet spot for marketing
So how do you find this MAYA surprise sweet spot for your brand?
Well, this varies by customer and category. No single exact sweet spot works for every brand. For example, banking customers will be less open to surprise than video game players.
The first step is customer understanding. Do your market research, so you understand what customers expect. Then research more until you can judge how to break those expectations with the right surprise.
Then, more experimentation. Surprise can be tricky to research. You can’t just ask customers. If they know what’s surprising, then it’s no longer a surprise. So, you have to put surprising ideas in front of them and observe their reactions. Does the surprise grab and hold their attention? But in a positive way, so they want to experience it more.
One way to tell if someone is genuinely surprised is to look at their eyes … and their eyebrows. An instinctive physical reaction we all make when surprised is to open our eyes as wide as we can. We scan the area and try to gather as much visual input as we can. This leads to what some designers call the “surprised eyebrows”, a natural arching of the eyebrows that happens when our eyes open wide in surprise.
So watch out for it next time you spring a marketing surprise. It suggests your customer is paying attention to what you’re trying to do.
Conclusion - The unexpected power of marketing surprise
It’s hard to beat a good surprise in marketing. But the key is to make it good for the customer. Because surprises can be bad too. The key is to find the right level of surprise. The marketing surprise sweet spot.
Do it well, and not only will you surprise customers, you’ll delight them. You’ll get their attention, hold their interest, and get them talking to their friends about how surprisingly good your brand is.
Get all that right, and your profit and loss might just see some surprisingly positive results.
Check out our emotions in creative article for more on marketing surprise. Or feel free to drop us a line if you’d like to talk about how to make your brand more surprising.
Photo Credits
Surprised Baby : Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Red tulip / Yellow tulip : Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Dog ears : Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash
Legal scales : Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
