A Surprise So Delightful
This story still makes me smile
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.” — Iris Murdoch, 1978
Surprise and delight. I’ve seen that used as a strategy in customer experience design.
The problem with that is if “surprise and delight” becomes your mantra, then it’s expected. And it's no longer a surprise, is it? At that point it would be more of a surprise if you offered some kind of boring, humdrum experience.
In the early portion of my tenure at Ford, we were trying all kinds of things. New platforms, new messaging, new vehicles. And people were generally surprised at what they saw (if they were paying attention). But it wasn’t just the new marketing or communications tools that were our crucible; we also experimented with executives too.
And sometimes, it’s not a matter of getting an executive to start a blog, join Instagram, make a Tik Tok video, or be a guest o…
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