Why tone down your marketing ?
Telling current and potential customers what you have to offer feels like good marketing. The problem is that our brains are much more keen on a positive surprise than anybody seems to realize. This is why it is worthwhile to tone down your marketing messages.
Aga, we just have to tell our customers that we have such a great offer for them.
These words are usually accompanied by an expression of total unconvinced grin of my interviewee or interlocutor face. How can anyone expect that if we have done such a cool thing we won’t tell everyone who will listen about it. After all, that’s how you get customers. This is good marketing. Of course, this is all true. Only this view doesn’t take into account how our brain works.
Our brains are predictive. This means that instead of passively perceiving the world, the brain actively anticipates what might happen next, based on previous experiences and learned patterns. These predictions are then compared with actual data, and any discrepancies between the predictions and reality lead to adjustments in how we perceive what’s going on around us. This iterative process helps the brain to understand the environment, reduce uncertainty and process information effectively.
Little of this process takes place at a conscious level, which is why it is so difficult to grasp. Yet the latest neuropsychological research stubbornly confirms this very phenomenon, which has major implications for how customers perceive brands, their offers and their marketing communication. Marketing communication is a tool for your customers’ brains to imagine what their interaction with your brand and with your solutions will be like.
If you promise too much, your customers’ brains will undoubtedly believe it and create an image that is relevant to that promise. That is to say, if you promise more than you deliver, you condemn your offer to failure in advance and yourself to disappointment in the eyes of your customers. And a dissatisfied customer will certainly tell others why you are not worth dealing with. This behavior stems from another phenomenon, this time an evolutionary one, which means that if we feel a threat, we want to warn everyone around us of it. Our brains do not distinguish between physical and psychological threat, so any situation where you fail to deliver on a given promise is perceived by the human brain as an attack by a sabre-toothed tiger on the savanna.
It is also worth remembering that promises are an universal social norm whose purpose is to create obligations, regulate behavior, reduce uncertainty and build trust. We keep them because they help us build the foundations necessary to establish and maintain relationships. In other words, a promise is a debt incurred. When a brand makes a promise that something will happen, our brain wants to believe that it will actually happen. When this promise is not fulfilled, it is not only seen as a damage to trust, but also as a violation of one of the most basic social norms. Such a situation goes far beyond disappointment — it changes how people perceive your company and how they interact with it.
Now imagine a situation where a particular company promised something and delivered more than you expected. You are then positively surprised. Surprise occurs when some new, previously unknown regularity catches our attention. It is a kind of emergency override that kicks in when our internal guessing mechanism fails. At this point, we immediately focus on the unexpected event. If the surprise is positive, customers are overwhelmed by a sense of satisfaction. And this feeling translates not only into a desire to share this insight with others but also a desire to explore further what the company offers.
‘It’s just that positive surprise comes at a cost’, — anyone who has invested in a wow effect will tell you. ‘The return on that investment hasn’t been particularly satisfying’ — they will probably add. This is where another predisposition of our brain — positive adaptation — comes in. It means that we quickly become accustomed to a good thing and something that was perceived as exceptional yesterday is now the new normal. We get used to high quality, good service or an attractive offer and subconsciously expect this level of experience to be at least consistent. Thus, a good customer experience is a serious commitment and should not be made unless you are absolutely convinced that you want to go into it.
But it’s also worth remembering that a good experience is best built by constant positive surprise that knocks customers out of their sense of positive adaptation. How do you do this? The recipe is simpler than you might think. Rather than investing in big changes that take a year or two to implement, it is far more effective to take an approach of continuous iterative change in a specific predetermined direction. Because if you say you want to be unconventional, for example, one month you can change the way you talk to customers, the next month some of the tests in the app and the next month add visuals that make you smile a little. None of this has to happen in parallel. None of it has to be a huge change. Because experience is built by a thousand small changes consistently implemented at every touch point with your customers.
This thousand small changes end up actually making you stand out in the market, and the competition has no respect to catch up with you. But for this, the first basic step is to tone down the promises, i.e. to leave your customers the chance to discover for themselves the flavors you have prepared. And even if this seems marketing-intuitive, you will notice sooner rather than later that you will increase your whisper marketing — that most effective and at the same time cheapest way of promoting your brand and its products.
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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, and “Leadership by Design: the essential guide to transforming you as a leader”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.
