When you heard Judy Garland sing the first word, “Some… where,” in “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, it happened to you.
The first time most people hear “As Tears Go By” by the Rolling Stones, “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel, any song by Joni Mitchell, Kim Carnes, or Adele, and the memorable long opening twang of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” it happens again.
Clever music students might be able to explain what caused each of those reactions—except the last.
Garland’s first two notes, “Some… where,” leap a full octave. That’s rare, especially from a twelve-year old girl.
In “As Tears Go By,” the surprise is hearing a guitar-driven hard rock group like the Stones singing to the accompaniment of—of all possible instruments—classical violins. (Similarly, there is the incongruity of the Stones’ aggressive lyrics in “Under My Thumb,” heard over a signature instrument of jazz, the gentle vibes.)
In “Superstition,” our surprise comes from the unusual collection of notes; Wonder plays almost the entire song on the black keys. (Don’t try that at home.)
In “Solsbury Hill,” what surprises us is hearing a rock song and bracing for rock’s signature 4/4 beat, and hearing instead a song in 7/4 time, a beat unusual in most music. (Notable exceptions would include Pink Floyd’s “Money” and part of the chorus in the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.”)
Hearing Joni Mitchell surprises us because she tunes her guitar erratically, creating notes different from any we’ve heard before.
And no musical training is required to realize the surprise of hearing Kim Carnes and Adele. Their voices remind us less of humans and more of forces of nature. Listening to Adele, we experience the added surprise of hearing, in “Chasing Pavements,” the longest vowels in popular music.
Then there’s the opening twang of “Hard Day’s Night,” for over forty years one of music’s great mysteries.
How did the Beatles do that?
For almost forty-six years, musicians tried to duplicate that opening chord by combining a Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar like George Harrison’s with John Lennon’s six-string and Paul McCartney’s bass. Everyone failed; they couldn’t make the sound. Then in 2010 a mathematician, of all people, took a shot. Instead of grabbing three guitars, he grabbed a yellow pad and felt pen and performed a calculation called a Fourier transform. From it, he deduced that a fourth instrument was involved, likely played by the Beatles’ composer, George Martin: a piano striking an F note.
But that opening note was so surprising and without precedent that it took over forty-five years, and a formula that includes the sequence f(x)e−2ΠixΣ, to explain it.
In classical music, the composer establishes the tone of the piece with what’s called the tonic note. Then for the rest of the song, the composer dances around the note without ever returning to it—variations of the note but never the note itself—until the final resolution. Instinctively, our brain wonders: How will this song return to its tonic note?
What we feel in the meantime is the delight of the journey, the surprise notes and rhythms, and then our pleasure when, like a riddle, the music resolves itself by returning to the tonic note.
The music we love depends on surprise. If a song falls into a predictable pattern, we lose all interest. It’s the surprises—the notes or lyrics we do not expect—that make a piece creep into the soul.
Our brains love surprises. We grew up wanting Cracker Jack for the “surprise in every package.” As teenagers we started to crave horror films, which leapt beyond surprise and into shocking. We crave surprise endings in movies and exclaim about predictable ones. We complain whenever life seems like just one thing after another; we want surprise.
We love joy, and joy depends entirely on surprise. If we know something will happen, it barely pleases us. The moments that delight us—the experiences that we love—take us by surprise.
Quentin Tarantino’s audacious 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds begins as a classic heroic-Americans-versus-demonic-Nazis movie and never visits there again.
To fit the mold, the Nazi colonel should look and behave brutishly. But in an Oscar-winning performance, German actor Christoph Waltz plays him as so dainty and polite that he gently asks a Frenchman whom he suspects of harboring Jews, “Might we switch from French to English?”
When a Jewish woman flees the house, the Nazi colonel spots her, draws out his pistol, takes aim, and—surprise—lets her escape down the grassy field.
The Nazis in Basterds kill only at a distance, sniping in kill-or-be-killed scenes. Our American heroes, by contrast to all film convention, scalp every victim and carve deep swastika tattoos into the survivors’ foreheads.
We feel certain that the woman who escaped, Shosanna, will survive to avenge the Nazis’ slaughter of her family. She does. But almost the instant she does, she feels love toward the Nazi war hero whom she shoots, and she tries to turn him over to save his life.
We love surprises and remember them—which is what gives them such marketing force. Surprises stick in our minds, like the surprises in this film that this author remembers more than six months after seeing it.
We see the force of surprise again in jokes. The effectiveness of a joke depends entirely on surprise, too, as Aristotle, among others, said long ago. There’s the setup, followed by a surprising twist. The conclusion has to surprise us; if we can guess the punch line before we hear it, the joke fails.
Hence “I slept like a baby. I cried all night.”
The setup makes us expect a quiet night’s sleep. Then we hear the opposite. That’s surprising, and that’s what makes it funny.
Many readers have heard about the grasshopper who walks into a bar, sits down, and asks what drink the bartender would recommend. The bartender says the grasshopper is in for a surprise: There’s a drink named for him! We know, or expect, that there is a cocktail called a grasshopper.
The grasshopper responds, “There’s a drink called Mervin?” The surprise of hearing “Mervin” instead of “grasshopper” makes us laugh.
Jokes are rooted in the power of surprise—something we crave from childhood.
“She drives me crazy, oh yeah
Like no else.
She drives me crazy
And I can’t help myself.”
The name of the band flashes instantly in a million minds: Fine Young Cannibals!
Why do we remember Fine Young Cannibals twenty years after their last hit but forget the name of products just minutes after hearing and seeing those names six times in a commercial?
It’s not because the Cannibals endured. They were two-hit wonders who enjoyed fifteen weeks of fame in 1989, then disbanded less than three years later.
Why do we remember that name?
Because just as Coldplay riddles us with “How can play be cold?” and 50 Cent makes us wonder “Shouldn’t it be cents?” the group’s name makes us wonder: How can people who eat people possibly be fine? Our minds demand a resolution of that riddle; we insist on closure and hate loose ends. (That’s why collectibles thrive. Once we buy a couple items, the plea “Be sure to get the whole set!” tantalizes us into doing just that.)
The word “Yahoo” sounds familiar; it’s just surprising when applied to a tech service or product, just as Apple is a familiar term when describing a fruit but surprising when describing a computer. “Buffalo” and “Springfield” are familiar names when describing towns in New York and Illinois but surprising when combined to describe a rock group. Their names are riddles.
Names like “Buffalo Springfield” sounded even more surprising in that group’s heyday, because before them, music groups had always used plural names: The Temptations and The Supremes, or The Four Tops and The Dave Clark Five.
Then along came Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield, which startled us. Four or five people singing but with a singular name?
To see riddles at work in marketing, consider the following:
Put a tiger in your tank. (Enco)
The future is bright. The future is Orange. (Orange Telecom)
So good, cats ask for it by name. (Meow Mix)
Say it with flowers. (FTD)
Each of these marketing slogans has won a spot in the Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame. (Yes, we have halls of fame for everything.)
What do they share in common?
Each is a riddle, because each suggests something impossible. A tiger cannot squeeze into a gas tank, the future isn’t a color, and neither cats nor tulips can talk. Each slogan suggests one of the great riddles: How do you do something that sounds impossible?
Now consider:
Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. (Peter Paul Mounds Bar)
When it rains, it pours. (Morton Salt)
The Citi never sleeps. (Citibank)
Nothing runs like a Deere. (John Deere)
Capitalist tool (Forbes)
Think small. (Volkswagen)
Heinz meanz beanz. (Heinz)
Each of these slogans takes a familiar phrase or image and adds a twist. The familiar expression “I feel like a nut” means that you feel slightly crazy. Hershey’s gave this surprise twist: Whether you feel like having a nut or you don’t, buy a Mounds Bar, because they come with nuts or without.
When Morton Salt manufactured the first salt that wouldn’t clump in moist air, they took a familiar phrase but cleverly put it in a new context: Morton Salt still pours even when it’s wet outside.
New York was famous as “the city that never sleeps.” Citibank gave the phrase new meaning as the bank that tried harder: “The Citi that never sleeps.”
Deere twisted the phrase “He runs like deer” to tell us that nothing runs like a John Deere; there’s also a wonderful element of play here in the puns on “runs” and “deer.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, hippies labeled those who they considered sellouts to American business as “capitalist tools.” In clever retaliation, Forbes proudly embraced the phrase and twisted it, proclaiming itself as the representative of that system and a vital tool for business.
“Think Small” flipped a classic American expression of optimism, “Think big,” and told us it was time we considered an automobile so small they called it “the bug,” the charming underdog of its era.
Heinz riffed on the familiar phrase “It doesn’t mean beans to me” to give the company a foothold in the canned beans market.
Why do marketers spend so much time worrying about these little phrases? It’s largely because a message needs to have an emotional peak and because the brain’s processing power is limited, particularly when it involves something that minimally engages us—things like beans, salt, and banks, to name three of the above. We won’t remember thirty words; we will remember six, however, if they resonate emotionally—and surprises do just that.
The second reason for the emphasis on themes relates to memory. Slogans typically are designed to appear at the end of a commercial or the bottom of an advertisement, and we tend to best remember the last thing we see or hear.
And if marketers make those slogans surprising, of course, we remember them even better.
In part, it’s because rhymes work like riddles. Every first line makes us wonder, “How will it be answered?” The second line gives us closure, the closure that we have to hear, because our minds hate loose ends.
Rhymes also are play. That’s all but proven by the name we give to exercises like rhyming: We call them wordplay. Play delights us, and what delights us sticks in our minds. That’s why today, most of us read “I would not eat green eggs and ham. I do not like them” and immediately remember “Sam-I-am.”
Which brings us to another collection of slogans from the Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame:
It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. (Timex)
Plop plop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is. (Alka-Seltzer)
The quicker picker upper. (Bounty paper towels)
When you got it, flaunt it. (Braniff International Airways)
Please don’t squeeze the Charmin. (Charmin toilet paper)
Great persuaders know that rhymes trick us; when words rhyme easily, we assume there is a genuine relationship between them. It’s the force behind Jesse Jackson, a persuader so devoted to rhyme that Jay Leno once announced that Osama bin Laden tried to hire Jackson because “they are having trouble coming up with anything that rhymes with ‘Taliban’.”
So we are more prone to believe that haste must make waste, even though we’ve also been told the opposite in a less memorable nonrhyme: “He who hesitates is lost.” The rhyme “Haste makes waste” sticks and sounds truer to us than the phrase that doesn’t.
If you doubt this, you’re not alone. The psychologist Matthew McGlorne of the University of Texas doubted it, too. So he ran a test. He showed subjects the expression “Woes unite foes” and a second expression with the identical idea: “Woes unite enemies.”
What happened?
The subjects were far more apt to believe the rhyming version than the nonrhyming one. Rhymes just sound like they must be right, or as someone put it nicely, “There is reason in rhyme.”
And was his understanding of this what led Johnnie Cochran to create for O. J. Simpson’s jury the memorable rhyme/closing argument “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”?
Whatever the explanation, rhythms and rhymes get us and trick us. They always have.
In 2008, Costco began offering on its website a unique canary diamond ring. The center stone weighed 10.61 carats, and the International Gemological Institute, which certifies diamond values, certified that it was worth $264,765.
A $5,000 diamond ring being offered for sale in a store known for enormous discounts surprises most people; a 10.61-carat ring that only Harry Winston might carry—and lend to Nicole Kidman on Oscar night—startles everyone.
Costco offered the ring for $180,000: $84,000 off!
We had to notice.
Costco’s canary diamond presents a surprise so big that it ventures into the realm of jokes. Costco’s diamond is the equivalent of the lead item in the Neiman Marcus annual Christmas catalog, which each year features startling gifts such as his-and-her mummy cases and hot-air balloons.
Surprises like these draw crowds into Costco and make millions of people eagerly open Neiman’s Christmas catalog. As the kids that we remain forever, we love surprises.
But these two surprises also are tricks. They set what decision-making experts and some readers know as anchors.
Our brains work around anchors. Studies show, for example, that if we flashed the number 1,120 at the beginning of this paragraph, then asked a paragraph later, “How many words are in the Gettysburg Address?” the average answer from readers would hover around 1,120. If we flashed the number 370 instead, however, the answer would hover around that number. (No one knows the correct answer—there are at least five known versions of the Gettysburg Address—but historians agree that 256 words is the best estimate.)
So we walk into a Costco and see a $180,000 ring. At this point, what is our idea of an expensive item? How cheap does a $145 espresso machine suddenly sound? After we see his-and-hers robots for $225,000 each, how can we not buy those little items priced only in four figures? (This also explains why Ralph Lauren offers an alligator bag for a mere $16,995. It makes us wonder how someone can possibly pass up the $1,695 leather bag.)
A few readers, reflecting on this example and the example of Costco exploiting our love of play, might find themselves thinking, “Yes, but I’ve never noticed a Costco ad or commercial.”
No, you haven’t. There aren’t any.
Rather than try to leverage the force of conventional push marketing, Costco appeals to our love of surprise and play, and to great effect. Founded less than thirty years ago, the wizards of Issaquah have created America’s third-largest retailer, its twenty-fourth-largest company, and one of the strongest cases anywhere for the power of appealing to our love of surprise and play.