Surpresaaa!

Viral marketing has become part of everyday vocabulary of many people. After all, almost all advertisers using this tool today. What some advertisers have not realized is that for a virus to be effective, there must be emotional. People share their experiences with each other on the Internet and beyond. And this is much more intense when the subject involves shared feelings of disgust, sadness, joy, fear and surprise.

Those feelings, definitely the surprise is that it helps to spread the news. Who does not remember the women eating chocolate na Paulista? A study by the Journal of Economic Psychology, examines what effect has this feeling about viral marketing and I will use some parts to help me explain better.

I'm surprised, but what is it?

The theorists say that the surprise is a short phenomenon caused by an unexpected change in what you consider as being normal for their standards. Anything that causes the change that you perceive as an element of surprise.

To have an adequate representation of reality, people check to see if its standards are appropriate to environmental stimuli around them. However, this check is unconscious. Once the stimuli differ in their patterns, the surprise happens.

To be more direct, every time something runs than you're used to, you are surprised. And the effects are immediate surprise: more focus on the stimulus, increased awareness and greater retention in memory in relation to other stimuli. This results in curiosity and exploratory behavior. Moreover, the excitement caused by the fact he was surprised intensifies his other experiences.

After the first impact, is the assessment: the surprise is good or bad? That feeling comes later, joy or sorrow? No matter, it will be shared equally because whenever we have feelings as well, we will also be new to others.

Now that I know, I will spread!

In its day-to-day, everything is normal, familiar. When you go to the bakery you have no reaction "intense" or unexpected. Everything happens as you're used to. But that may change if we add an element of surprise there. If you find a cockroach in the middle of crisp toasts bread, will be quite startling and in less than an hour everyone you know will know. It was a negative feeling, but you did word-of-mouth to happen.

Like what happens to evil can happen to you, if you arrive in the same bakery, and suddenly the owner gives you a pot of butter, you will feel rewarded. Will see an advantage in that and will spread the word the same way. The great thing then is to think in ways that promote good surprises in the public, adding value to their experience of unusual ways. Make them have good reactions and encourages them to disclose the brands, products and services. It means that we must understand how the normal range of your target audience work.

Surprise the consumer may be useful in several ways. In solo form, a viral, a video or even as a decoy to some other section of a site. The important thing is to understand every step of the interaction with the consumer to know which element of surprise is more appropriate. This mechanism can (and used) both multimillion-dollar campaigns (The Dark Knight, for example) and in smaller and regional campaigns. You just need to know the right to what was unexpected into something trivial and of little importance to the audience, which results in a decrease of efficiency. That is, what is to become a new standard for the people and surprise disappears.