Why do I love
Surprise marketing so much?
Because it’s the
lubricant to “Yes.”
There’s nothing
more that marketers want to hear than that word. You can yammer along about customer
retention, building community, unaided recall, blah, blah, effin’-blah all you
want, but no other term really matters.
It’s the word with the most buzz—Yes.
But when it comes to getting you there, so many
marketers do it so damn wrong. They
drive you crazy, flash strobes at you, get in your face and spew spittle on you
as they talk. They pounce on you as you enter the store, and spam you for eternity once you leave.
In an article in The Economist late last year, Joe
Staton, the head of JWT's Knowledge Center, summed it up best when he said:
“Selling people
things has become more difficult than it has ever been.”
And for good reason. The problem is simple,
and deep-rooted:
People don’t want to be sold.
When I was at Just For
Laughs, I would be deluged with hundreds of phone calls, emails, letters and
packages every week by well-meaning-but-insanely-overbearing agents and
managers, all trying to push their clients with bribes, threats, promises and oodles
of dubious achievements like: “He’s the second hamburger in that hot new Wendy’s
commercial!”
And I would tell
them the same thing.
Over and over
again:
Don’t try to sell
me;
just make it easy
for me to buy.
Let me discover
your product, service or offer.
Don’t
make me feel that somehow, it was forced on me.
Don’t, not for a second, make me feel that the decision was yours, not mine.
Seth Godin (yes,
here I go again) has laid down a great post about four levels
of marketing effort, the last being the Zen-like approach of No (Apparent)
Effort. It’s almost an "anti-marketing,"
one which sells you by not selling.
Such is the raison
d’etre of Surprise: Delight first…they’ll buy later.
As I said at the
start...
Surprise is the
lubricant to “Yes.”
That’s the ultimate
marketing destination. The place we all wanna get to.
So stop pushing. Instead, make it easy for me to pull.
