Ooohs, Ahs and Apple Juice

 

I listened in to a webinar from eat big fish and System1 last week on "The Startling Power of Surprise". Surprise and its use in the world of brands and their communications is something I've often posted about, for example here and here. 

The webinar - and my surprise posts - pick up some big (and maybe unsurprising) themes about surprise:

First of all, the pursuit of seamlessness and consistency (rather than coherence), the predictability inherent in algorithms, the requirement to be formulaic so that you can be found by AI, all leads to a rather unhappy dearth of surprise in our lives.

And then there’s getting the balance right - novelty and the familiar - as mastered by brands like IKEA with just the right mix of innovation and ritual.

And finally, there’s surprise and surprise. What about negative surprise? The word is usually prefixed by nasty/unwelcome/unpleasant in this case, but how do you judge that? Then there are those cognitive dissonance types of surprises where things are so off-kilter/not fitting to the brand where the brain simply switches off and ignores it.

And there’s there’s plain old shock-value, just for the sake of it.

What I found particularly interesting in the webinar was the dictinction between surprise as a little creative flourish/an executional twist ,and surprise as a strategic tool. Adam Morgan calls this the “Oh!” and the “Ohhhh!”.

The long “Ohhhh!” has more lasting effect on the memory - and can reframe the category in people’s minds, or change their relationship with the brand. 

I was surprised recently by the design work by the Stuttgart agency Papa Tom for wildling apple juice spritzer. Most German apple juice/applewein brands tend to use artisanal/homely/countryside/traditional imagery and design, which gets pretty samey, especially once AI is let loose on it. 

But wildling is surprising in its approach - which includes the nettles in the product itself - it looks a touch dangerous, edgy, mysterious. Not something for a kiddies’ birthday party.

Gets a definite “Ohhh!” from me.