“Surprise and delight” has become the Doe-Anderson catchphrase for winning the hearts of our clients’ customers. It’s a notion that transcends a transactional relationship and creates a friendship between the brand and its users.
In order to do that, we have a set of guiding principles to which we rather rigorously adhere:
1. Creating surprise and delight should never be programmatic. Rather it should stem from that moment when someone says, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” I have a story about an experience with Southwest Airlines (maybe the masters of “surprise and delight”) that typifies this point to a tee.
2. Nothing should be expected in return. That’s the one that makes most marketing people crazy, because it delinks the quid pro quo of the normal commercial relationship. Once that delink occurs, customers can become friends and friends can become advocates.
3. It doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, the more expensive it is, the more suspicious the recipient becomes. The surprise and delight should, however, reflect the value (not necessarily monetary) you place on the relationship.
4. Embrace random. It should occur with enough infrequency so that it appears spontaneous. The degree of irregularity is directly proportionate to the degree of surprise.
5. Adhere to the brand’s tenets. The surprise and delight should always be within the core values of the brand and spoken in the brand voice.
In order to execute an effort such as this, there are a few things that you have to believe:
1. Having brand loyalists (friends) is a much better long-term strategy than simply driving transactions.
2. Friends will tell their friends about your brand because they WANT to. That’s called advocacy, the holy grail of marketing.
3. Friends will forgive you when you screw up.
4. It makes the competitors nuts.
The difficulty with this enterprise is it’s hard to do and harder to sustain. And everybody in the organization wants to have a hand in it. Accounting is always telling you, you’re off budget, sales is telling you to delight them with a coupon off on their next purchase, the database people want to put a scan code on it to track it, etc., etc., etc. and the next thing you know, you’re operating not a “surprise and delight”, but a “bore and turn-off” shelf program.
The good news is once it begins and the enterprise is flourishing, you’ll have an effort that is sustainable and scaleable and can be the key driver for your business.
