Resonance builder 4: Unexpectedness
The next time you go to make a journey, try to count the number of road signs you see. Even on a short journey you won’t be able to sustain the effort. Road signs are ubiquitous. Where there is traffic there will be signs on how the traffic should be managed. No stopping. No parking. Watch out for animals. High occupancy only. We are so bombarded with signs that most will simply blur into a background of noise.
Human brains are capable of perceiving so much information that they have evolved to be even more capable at prioritising it. There is an evolutionary incentive behind being able to ignore information that isn’t useful and identify things that stand out. The caveman that isn’t able to perceive the unusual low, hungry purring from bush with a suspiciously stripey shape behind it, or the crack of a dry twig that rises above the background soft breeze is likely to become dinner for a predator. Human minds are excellent prioritisation engines. While computers are able to process incredible volumes of data very accurately, so far (though they are catching up) only humans are able to assimilate different forms of data concurrently and identify the unusual.
This capability is achieved by managing the usual, and allowing only the unusual to slip through. The brain is able to engage a kind of auto pilot. An input occurred, therefore I will take this action – all done with little conscious effort. Most human action as executed through subconscious (though learned) pattern identification and action. Think again about that car journey we started this section with. If you are driving a route you know well, you don’t have to read every speed limit sign to know that you are in a 50mph zone. Your brain knows that this road is always a 50, so you can focus on other things like the traffic around you. Only if you suddenly arrive at a diversion will you find your brain is suddenly much more active. There are no automated patterns for this new route. You need to concentrate more on where you are going. Directions and speed limits need to be read and understood. While you’re doing this, you may well find that you stop paying attention to the radio show that you were listening to. Your brain will focus on the task at hand, deprioritising other senses until you’re back on track, when you may notice that you’ve missed part of an interesting discussion. This is also why distractions in cars can be so dangerous – it can become easy to lose focus on the road because it is repetitive and you believe you know it, until you don’t.
In order for an idea to capture attention and resonate, it needs to be unexpected. There is nuance to this, however. Consider the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment where people are asked to watch a short video of people passing baseballs around – three people wearing white shirts and three in black shirts. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point while you are watching this video a person in a gorilla costume strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and then leaves, likely spending around ten seconds on screen. The logical assumption would be that people watching the video see the gorilla and ask puzzled questions about its purpose afterwards. In fact, half of the people that watched this video will not even see the gorilla. They are so busy focusing on correctly counting the passes that even something as unusual as a camera-loving great ape isn’t enough to grab their attention. In this example the gorilla does not look that dissimilar to the ball-passers in black shirts, and is thus not suitably unexpected. Interrupting with the unexpected needs to be cleverly considered. You can find this video on YouTube, though as you’ve read this site you’ll be expecting a gorilla. But try showing it to a friend or family member without briefing them and see what happens.
Digital advertising has notoriously low engagement rates because advertising is, to an extent, expected. When you go on LinkedIn, adverts are to be expected. Asa marketer, why do you expect ads that look like other ads to stand out on a platform that has ads? Only when ads make clever leaps with messaging and creative and break the frame of expectation are you more like to notice them. This is, fortunately, still the art of great marketing.
There are some important considerations that should be kept in mind when trying to plan the unexpected. Firstly, it is very easy for the context gap to distort your understanding of what ‘expected’ is. Talking about a subject in a way that is irrelevant does not increase an audience’s likelihood of engagement. In fact, being off topic can decrease the likelihood of recognition because you will fall foul of the brain’s filter that strips away details that don’t need attention right now. And it should be obvious that being unexpected but also uninteresting is also unlikely to drive significant impact. To be unexpected, you must build on some level of expectation. An idea without context is not unexpected, it’s just a random thing that blends into the background of other disconnected ideas.
Secondly, the concept of ‘expected’ is determined by the audience and can take different forms. A message or subject can be unexpected but in brand or context that is always ‘out there’ this might not mean much. Tabloid newspapers are well known and generally disregarded precisely because their quest for BOLD HEADLINES leads them to make spurious, sensationalist claims, but their brand doesn’t have the credibility to carry it through. A flow-breaking message from an organisation that is known for shocking messages of a certain style can just as easily be disregarded as functional messages from direct organisations.
And thirdly, even unexpected messages have a lifetime for their unexpectedness. Successful advertising campaigns are not simply re-run ad infinitum. Eventually audience saturation starts to occur and returns diminish. It takes a message being repeated, on average 12 times for a person to engage with it but most digital advertising demonstrates a performance drop off when an audience becomes over exposed.