Why surprise alone does not build a brand

by Nigel Hollis

A paper published in WARC claims that surprise is the secret ingredient when it comes to building a brand, but how does this finding hold up in the face of testing people’s emotional response to over 30,000 ads? Not well.

Gordon Euchler, Ton Hollander and Christian von Thaden’s paper asserts that consistency is overrated when it comes to building a brand. Instead they propose that brands need to be surprising. Much as this proposition might appeal to those who believe consistency confines creativity, the evidence presented in the paper is thin, consisting of just one academic paper.

“An electrodermal study by Sieke (2010) shows that the strongest effect to activate people does not come from the usual emotional triggers like curiosity, disgust, joy, fear, anger or sadness, but simply from the ability of communication to surprise.”

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And while framed in the context of the latest learning about how brands influence sales the paper actually suggests that surprise is a means to engage active attention not increase sales, stating,

“The big challenge is to surprise not just with one creative idea but with each and every piece of communication, yet make them all strengthen the same takeout about the brand.”

So is surprise really a panacea for disinterest? Much as I agree that surprise can be powerful device for getting attention I have to point out that it can also evoke a negative response.

All Kantar Millward Brown’s evidence from testing thousands of video ads using the neuroscience technique of Facial Coding finds that surprise is weakly correlated with measures indicative of likely sales success. Surprise is not always related to a positive response. People may be surprised because the ad is shocking, evoking a negative emotional response, or surprised by a presentation that contradicts how they already think of the brand. Instead, Kantar Millward brown finds expressiveness – how much someone’s face expresses emotions in total – is a better predictor of how well a video is likely to create branded impact.

The report seems to suggest that consistency is a negative which seems to contradict the Ehrenberg-Bass position (which the authors cite) and our own Brand Imprint research. Our databases show almost all leading brands have clear mental positionings built up over time. Once a brand has found a new and effective way to reframe how people see a brand we find that continuity is important. This does not mean that a campaign should replicate how the brand is presented with every execution but rather refresh and strengthen people’s existing associations by using different creative executions (consistent with the authors own statement quoted above).

Sadly, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to brand building or engaging a disinterested audience, so why do people continue to claim there is?