No Surprises, Please

A friend is an Executive Chef at a fantastic Melbourne restaurant.

Last week he made a tiny little tweak to his menu…

…And this one change led to a 400% increase in sales for his most profitable menu item.

Are you ready for it?…

Instead of calling his fancy rustic Mediterranean dinner pastries “pides”, he now calls them “pizzas”.

This one change led to a 400% increase in sales.

In one week.

With no change to the ingredients.

With no additional advertising.

It’s a great example of how word selection matters – and how we’re increasingly selling through print (not just online and in ads, but on menus, text messages, emails and more).

But the reason why “pizzas” outsell “pides” shines a light on how we’re wired as a species.

Passengers in Robotic Meat-Machines

As a species, humans are hard-wired to follow patterns.

We like to imagine that we’re in control of our own destiny. But most of our lives are spent as passengers in a robotic machine made of meat.

Have you ever driven to work and then had trouble remembering how you got there? What route you took? What you thought about on the way in?

On a Monday, have you ever been asked what you got up to over the weekend – and struggled to remember?

Our brains make up about 2% of our total body weight.

But they consume around 20% of our body’s total energy expenditure.

Automatic thought patterns helped us to conserve energy in the most energy-hungry parts of our body, and keep doing things that worked for us in an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of approach to life.

It was an evolutionary trait that helped us to get away with eating less food (which might be scarce).

Nowadays, our automatic thought patterns lead many of us to live lives of quiet despair: trapped in routines and habits that aren’t “our best selves” – but kept in those patterns by the magnetic force of those habits themselves; and the pain and effort that it might take to take a risk that might benefit us in the long term.

In the refrain on how we tend to take the quiet life that slowly kills us, Thom Yorke of Radio Head sings “No alarms and no surprises, please”.

This Is Why Most Disrupters Fail

The buzzword in Silicon Valley is “disruption”.

“Disruption” solves big problems.

“Disruption” helps us to live better lives.

But – off the top of your head – how many successful companies can you name that began as disruptive startups?

Five? Maybe ten?

That’s a TINY minority of the 32,439 startups in AngelList’s directory.

(It’s roughly the same chance that an American high school basketballer will be drafted into the NBA or WNBA – or the chance that you’ll pick four of the six main numbers, plus the Powerball, on a single entry in tonight’s draw.)

“Disruption” might massively improve our lives.

But habit is hard to change.

And disrupters need to change habitual thought patterns and buying behaviour.

Yes, your widget might be a better way of achieving an outcome than anything else on the market. But if you have to explain it – you’ve already lost a large portion of your audience.

It’s the reason why complicated or novel products might use a 30-minute infomercial to sell.

Or why an info-preneur’s course might use a long-form sales letter or 60-minute webinar… And STILL only get a 1-3% sales conversion rate.

Convincing someone to do anything that is new and different takes a LOT more effort than convincing them to keep doing the same thing.

Selling the Unsurprising

The flip-side of this is that being unsurprising sells ridiculously well.

Just ask McDonald’s.

It’s not the best quality or fanciest place to eat.

But – no matter where you are in the world – when you see those golden arches, you know EXACTLY what you’re going to get.

Perhaps you’re not the kind of person who normally eats McDonald’s – but traveling in an unfamiliar place, you gravitate towards it.

It’s a place where “the world makes sense again”.

You can rely on a clean bathroom and familiar food.

(It’s perhaps the reason why McDonald’s has focussed heavily on airport, railway and highway locations of late. When traveling, we’re more likely to compromise on our need for quality for if it means we save mental effort.)

This doesn’t mean you have to be like McDonald’s to sell.

But it helps if you can find a way to describe your product as “pizza” instead of “pide”.