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Great expectations - why try to manage the expectations of others?

In the selling game, the expectations of your customers or target customers are a critical issue that you have to think about with some finesse.

If your target customer base has low expectations of the performance of your offering they will not buy it and you will have no customers.

If they have a high expectation and expect that it will do what they want, they will probably buy your offering.

Great!

But, what happens if the reality of your offering does not live up to the expectations which your promotion created? Your customers will feel let down and may start bad mouthing you or worse, demand refunds, make complaints, generate bad publicity.

So already expectations can be seen to be a difficult balancing act.

You have to create some expectation, too little and you will never win any customers, too much and they may never buy again.

Where is the middle ground?

The best solution could be to create a slightly lower expectation of performance than you know your offering will deliver.

This way your customers, assuming that the expectation level created is adequate to persuade them to purchase, will be more pleased with their purchase than they had anticipated being.

This is likely to create lots of positive word of mouth advertising which may have a significant additional effect. I am going to call this "underselling".

What are the problems?

Well perhaps the performance of your offering does not allow you to persuade people to buy it, when you undersell it.
Perhaps the actual performance of your competitors offerings is greater than the undersell level of your offering, thus if your target customers perceive this, your competitors get the business.

You need to know what the customer is expecting from your offering. This may even differ from the benefits you are promoting.

Simple Examples:

A formerly free to the user service.

A company I have been involved with is about to reduce the performance of a free to the user service, yet provide the full (formerly free) service in the future for the nominal price of about $10 per year.

I find that no problem. I feel that at that price the service is still very good value, I was amazed they used to provide the former service free to the user and had no real expectation it would remain so.

But many users have been complaining bitterly because their expectation was that the valued service would remain free to the user.

That company is getting significant bad press at the moment, I am sure they are aware of this but as their other income stream has probably dried up I am not sure in this circumstance that they had any option.

The Get rich quick scheme.

How do people know so quickly to put junk mail containing these schemes straight into the bin?

Because the expectations shouted on the first line are always ridiculously un achievable.

"MAKE $$10 MILLION FROM 2 HOURS A WEEK"
"GET RICH BY SITTING ON YOUR BACKSIDE!!"

You know the sort of thing I mean.
People are not dumb.
Most folk know that if it looks too good to be true it probably is.

In this case the expectations they are trying to create are simply so high as to not be believable. How about a get rich quick scheme that said join us, "work hard all your life and die poor" well I guess that would be the other extreme! :-)

Political parties.

In the recent British elections a great deal was spoken about expectations which built on the hype from the last general election campaign.

The Labour party winners returned somewhat dourly from victory to government, because they have arguably overcooked expectations in the country.

With their second term of 4 more years, they know quite clearly that at its end they will have absolutely no excuse for not having delivered on the expectations their selling exercise has created.

Can your offering match or exceed the expectation your customers have of it?

Author Mark Abraham (mark@sticky-marketing.net) 28 June 2001