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The Shocking Power of Surprise
December 03, 2008
Let's face it, there's nothing more that we want to hear than the word "yes." Professorial types can yammer on all day long, spout the traditional marketing idiom of customer retention, building community, unaided recall—blah, blah, blah—but in the end, no other term matters more. So stop pushing people. Instead, make it easy for them to pull. Shock them first and they'll buy soon after.
By Andy Nulman
Want to discover a new way to motivate customers to buy? Well, here's a big surprise for you, literally: The element of surprise is the most important influencer in marketing and sales decisions today.
While it recalls the frivolity of birthday parties and practical jokes, surprise is far from superficial; once it seizes, surprise helps influence decisions and it's often the deciding factor in someone choosing you over the dreaded "other guy."
But surprise isn't a luxury. It's a veritable necessity—more necessary for businesses now than ever when dealing with today's cynical consumers who have more access to more information, who take for granted that everything had better be right every time and know how to complain loudly when it's not.
When it comes to price, quality, after-sales service and the shopping experience—the whole enchilada—your customers know what they want. They want it all. And more than that, they EXPECT it all.
And there's only one way to please people who expect it all: Give them what they don't expect when they least expect it.
The Shock Factor
By its very definition and nature, surprise can't be expected, hence its status as a seller's indispensable secret weapon. (It's the stealth stuff that ends up kicking butt when you’re not looking.)
Surprise doesn't merely kick butt; it works wonders on the body's opposite end as well. Surprise raises eyebrows, pops eyes and opens mouths, creating the familiar :surprise face" (actually, one of the seven basic human facial expressions). The surprise face is the portal to the soul, allowing you to reach deep down and provide that special feeling of lasting impression that only surprise can spawn, called "Euphoric Shock." It's when your heart skips a beat, when you're overcome with that special little tingle and you can't wait to see what happens next.
To best understand the sensation of euphoric shock, think of a casino and how your body reacts when the roulette ball comes to a full stop in the hole of the number you just played. Now imagine that feeling without the precursor of putting down a bet…
That's surprise—a cause-and-effect relationship where the cause is hidden to your customer and controlled by you. This hidden cause jumpstarts a modern marketing relationship by upsetting a customer's system and putting it into a state of flux. This mildly alarming internal stirring and accompanying euphoria reduces resistance and makes your potential customers more susceptible to an impending sales message.
A happy, excited customer makes less demands, asks less questions and is almost completed by consummating a transaction with you. It's the "lubricant to yes."
Yes: The Three-Letter Symphony
Just ask the people over at Nintendo. A videogame pioneer, Nintendo became a tired afterthought at the turn of the 21st century, playing a distant third fiddle to Playstation and Xbox. Going head-to-head against them was suicide, so Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president and CEO, took a different route. He introduced the radically simple Wii entertainment system, which eschewed the industry's traditional hard-core gamer audience and went after regular folk.
"We are not competing against Sony or Microsoft," said Iwata. "We are battling the indifference of people who have no interest in videogames. Wii was unimaginable for them. And because it was unimaginable, they could not say they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them."
But surprise them is what Iwata did, and in a major way. He gave people what they didn't expect. And the people responded in kind: In the first six months of direct competition with Microsoft and Sony, Wii outsold Xbox 360 on a two-to-one basis, and crushed Playstation 3 by a four-to-one margin.
A Bond Eternally Concretized
Surprises don't merely generate delightful astonishment from your customers, they solidify the bond between you and them. And I don't care what business you are in, from a mom-and-pop corner store to a global corporation, there is nothing more important than the bond between you and your customer. Find ways to eternally concretize this bond and you'll never have another business worry.
Your surprises don't have to be earth-shattering either, just convention shattering. It may be scary, but exploring and exploiting the unknown provides disproportionate returns. Consider life to be a round hole. Your job is to be the square peg that fits.The reward is worth the risk—if you're willing to take it, that is.
Three Important Things to Remember
1. The unexpectedness of surprise is the only way to please tough consumers who have come to expect it all
2. By delivering euphoric shocks, surprise becomes "The Lubricant to Yes."
3. Surprise requires guts, vision and risk-taking, going where no one has gone before. They may not all work, but those that do, work big.
 This article has been adapted from Andy Nulman's upcoming book Pow! Right Between the Eyes! Profiting from the Power of Surprise, which will be published February 23, 2009 by John Wiley and Sons. Read more about this upcoming title at www.incentivemag.com. Learn more at www.andynulman.com.
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