Embrace the unexpected

Seth Godin's blog post on embracing the unexpected appeared while my husband John and I were on a one-week driving trip to visit the small towns where our ancestors used to live.  It was a very low key and absolutely delightful trip.  Talk about not the mainstream! 

For professional service marketers, I found his final three points to be especially helpful:

"1. Embrace expectations and build a product or service that fits what people are looking for. No change of behavior necessary. Be in the right place at the right time with the right thing priced appropriately and hope the competition doesn't show up.

2. Change the expectations. No one expected to be able to buy digital music for 99 cents a song and have it show up on their iPod. Now, that's the default expectation in some communities. Changing an expectation builds a huge barrier to those that might follow. Change is time consuming, expensive and rarely happens on schedule.

3. Defy the expectations. Do the unexpected. This is tempting but often leads to nothing but noise.

Before you start marketing something, it helps to be able to describe which combination of the three you're setting out to accomplish."