Great Expectations, Part Fifteen: What If You Need To Raise Expectations?

By Sanya Weathers

This entire series has been about managing expectations, and regular readers have already noticed that in nearly every installment, we’ve been trying to manage expectations downward.

An unknown product is a blank slate onto which your customers can project their own wishes and fantasies about the perfect game or service. It doesn’t matter what genre your social network or game is in, either. If you were making a knitting simulator, your forum and your Facebook page will attract a small group of people who think you should offer a sheep raising minigame so people could make their own wool yarn and sell it in an open marketplace that lets people cash in their virtual currency for real money. And the knitting needles should conceal laser beams that can take out other knitters.

Expectations get out of hand so quickly, with so little fuel, that expectation management is largely the science of reining people in.

But just in case you’ve managed to not have that problem:

–    Release images, but no text. A pretty picture allows the prospective user to imagine and to dream, and to project himself into the image as a consumer. Text is limiting. See also nearly every car ad ever made and Apple products.

–    Along the same lines, don’t talk – or if you talk, don’t talk about the product. Talk about your hopes for the product. Take wild flights of fantasy of all the things your product could accomplish in a distant future. Talk about the company, its humble origins, its hardworking people. Get people invested in being part of something bigger than themselves, belonging to a team, or making history. The nuts and bolts of product development aren’t part of a fantasy.

–    Make previews exclusive. What’s the fastest way to get a line to form in front of a club? Put a rope in front of it and tell people they can’t come in.

–    Give previews to community leaders as well as members of the media. Exclusive means keeping average players out – but not those representing hordes of average players. Impressing the leader of a group of people (a gaming guild leader, an influential blogger, the host of a popular message board) will result in more subscriptions than a good review. Furthermore, those community leaders will warn their own followers of the negative/frustrating elements of your product – which manages expectations and leads to greater satisfaction.