What Expectations Are You Setting?

Image credit: OkayCityNate

I came across a post by Amanda Mooney over the weekend asking brands to stop setting grandiose expectations with their online advertising and then failing to deliver upon them. I can only assume she had recently felt duped by some company trying to "connect" with her, as I'm sure many of us have experienced in one form or another at some point. She says:

"Do something cool where I’m hanging out already unless you really need to redirect me.

Because, unless there really is something amazing there [and not in that "look at the new flavor we have!" kind of amazing], I’ll be really annoyed and make note… to never trust your ads in the future"

Setting expectations pre-experience with your product / marketing / Web site is something Noah has covered a couple times, is something Russell has shared some thoughts on, and I'm sure others have as well. Today it can be even trickier as I've expressed before, thanks to highly-followed, speculative subject matter experts and passionate fans of your brand that use social media heavily who are not at all involved in creating your marketing sharing their over-blown hopes for what is to come.

Now, you can't control what others say about you, but you can control what you place in the market and how you respond to what others are putting out there. When you put an ad, a micro site, a press release, etc. out into the world, you're giving people a piece of information they will use to set or adjust their expectations of your brand.

If they have no previous experience with your product or service, these pieces of information are going to help them create a vision of what they think it must be like. For those who have already experienced your product or service, these communications will either reinforce a positive experience they've had with you or make them recall just how much you underwhelmed, disappointed or frustrated them.

An easy way to think about it is to consider the last time you went to a movie or a concert you had really high expectations for thanks to the previews you had seen on TV or the buzz you heard from others who had seen it / them before, and then walked out of that experience severely disappointed. Or, to the counter, think of a time you went into an experience with no expectations and walked out pleasantly surprised.

Now, I'm not advocating for taking some of the mystery and surprise out of what we do, that would be no fun at all. But this is something we all need to be more cognizant of and make sure we're balancing appropriately. What is really exciting and big news to those of us who work on a product or service every day might not really matter that much at all to the people you're trying to communicate with. In reality, your brand may play a very small role in their everyday life.

As my first mentor in the ad business told me on my first day ...

"It's far better to under-promise and over-deliver than it is to do the opposite."

Comments

[scott crawford]

Yep. Nailed it. UPOD is that time-honored recipe for joy. .
Thanks for sharing.

[Amanda Mooney]

Your post is spot on and thanks for taking the time to check out my little rant:) Yeah, it's simple really- the social media space calls for brands to be straight up. If you want to sell me something, sell me something. If you want to have a chat about a broader topic you care about that I might care about as well, let's chat. But throwing a flashy ad in my face with crazy creative only to direct me to your Web site is crazy.