Before we move to the next principle about making ideas stick, I want to stick with simple for just one more minute. I want you to watch this minivan ad and look at how they communicate, simply, what their message is. Introducing the all new Enclave, it's a minivan to the max with features like remote control sliding rear doors, 150 cable channel, a full sky view roof, temperature controlled cup holders, and the six-point navigation system. It the minivan for families on the go. Wow, pretty surprising. I don't think we expected that, and that actually brings us to our next point which is unexpected. That wasn't just simple, it was unexpected, it was novel or surprising. To make ideas stick, we have to understand how to make our messages unexpected. Think for a moment about what made that ad so unexpected. Think about what they did. Well, really what they did effectively was they set up a pattern. All of us were sitting there thinking, well, it would be a normal minivan ad. What did they do to get us there? If you think about it, they showed things that we expect in a normal minivan ad. They showed a child coming back from soccer practice, they showed temperature controlled cup holders, and they showed him wistfully looking out the window as he went by in the car. All those things to walk us down a garden path like we had seen this before. When we get into a pattern, when we get into a routine, we think we know what's going to happen next, and then out of nowhere they broke that pattern, and that novelty, that surprise got our attention. One way to be unexpected is to violate expectations by breaking a pattern. To break what we expect by setting up a pattern and then breaking it. Great brands do this all the time. DoubleTree, for example, is an interesting mid-priced hotel, it's a business traveler hotel. There you have a lot of what you'd expect from a usual business traveler experience. They have pretty nice rooms, but not amazing rooms. They have 20, 30 television channels in the room, the labia is nicer than the room, they have shampoo bottles and conditioner when you walk into the bathroom, they have a hairdryer or other things. Everything you would expect from this hotel. That's what the pattern is from a business hotel. But then they do one thing to break that pattern. When you check in, they have fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. Everyone remembers that detail when they check in because it's so unusual for a hotel class of that caliber. You're not used to someone giving you a fresh baked cookie, you're used to a continental breakfast that has, well, not very exciting food. Maybe if you're lucky it has a fresh waffle or a little bowl of cereal that you can crack open to eat, maybe a piece of fruit here and there, but a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie, that's much different than the pattern that we might expect from a middle-class business hotel. Because it's unexpected, because it breaks that pattern, it gets our attention. What's really important to remember here when we think about being unexpected is it's not about doing something crazy. Sometimes we think about, well, we should just do something surprising. We want to get someone's attention? Let's dress up in a chicken costume and go down to the subway and throw fake hundred dollar bills in the air. That would certainly get people's attention, it would be really surprising, but it wouldn't hold their attention. To make something really sticky, to make something stick in memory, we need to hold their attention by opening up what's called a curiosity gap. What a curiosity gap is, is a mystery where people want to know the answer. It's a little bit of information that encourages them to lean forward to find out more. They want to watch the rest of the message, watch the rest of the ad to figure out what's going to happen next. If you ever watched a reality TV show, for example, and you want to find out who gets voted off at the end of the episode, ever found yourself watching a football game and you don't really care about the teams you want to find out who wins, it's opened up a gap in our knowledge where we want to find the answer. Really good things that make themselves stick, open up this curiosity gap. One famous example you may have heard of was a movie that came out a number of years ago called The Blair Witch Project. This famous movie was a horror movie released in 1999, and related the story of three student filmmakers who disappeared while hiking to film a documentary about a local legend called The Blair Witch. Now, the viewers were told that these three hikers, these three students were never heard from again, though the video footage and sound equipment was found a year later, and this recovered footage was part of that film that the viewer is watching. Now, if you wanted to find out more about this, you might go to the website and see pictures. Well, it's not pictures of a director, it's pictures of the three student filmmakers, it's pictures of their abandoned car. Everything about it made it seem like it was real, and so people wondered, well, was this actually a real movie? Was there actually a Blair Witch? Had these students really disappeared? They went to the website, it was consistent, they talked to their friends, their friends didn't know, the only way to find out the answer was to watch that movie. It opened up a curiosity gap, what was an appetizer that people wanted to find out more, and in fact, they did. The movie sold over $250 million in tickets by bringing people in rather than turning them off. Too often when we want to sell a message, we think, well, let's hit people over the head with information, let's tell them how much they need to care about this particular thing. But really good marketing, and really good messaging pulls people in rather than pushing them away. It opens that curiosity gap and gets their attention. But when we do curiosity gaps, be careful about repetition because it dulls that surprise. Blair Witch Project was really successful, hugely successful movie, and then they came out with The Blair Witch Project 2, The Book of Shadows, and they said, hold on, this first movie we tricked you, but this one is really real. People said, well, no, it's not. You already did this once. I think back to that video I showed you of the minivan ad. If I showed it to you a second time it probably wouldn't be as surprising. You know that, that car is going to come out of nowhere, you know that there's going to be a crash, and you know that there's going to be an ad about seat belts, about the importance of wearing seat belts. The second time you've seen it, it's no longer unexpected, and as a result, it dulls that surprise.
