what happened to serendipity?

I was at a house party last week and I was put in charge of the music. (Ok, maybe I put myself in-charge but that’s not relevant right now). Somewhere between Sean Paul and Sukhbir my phone battery got down to 2% and I had to find a charger. In the interim, I asked my friend for his phone to play from till my phone got some juice back. He gave it to me saying –

“Bro play from YouTube on Incognito haan, otherwise my algorithm will get screwed.”

I was in an outstation train recently, sharing a compartment with a group of college kids going on vacation. Inevitably, a game of antakshri broke out. As the group cycled through Bollywood soundtracks from Kishore Kumar all the way to Kesariya – the most enthusiastic choral participation was reserved for “WASHING POWDER NIRMA. WASHING POWDER NIRMA. DUUUDH KI SAFEDIIIII….”. From thereon, they went through ad-jingles for everything from Vicco Vajradanti to Ujjala.

After this, the train got out of the ghats and tunnels section of the route. Once stable 4G network was available again, the antakshri stopped and they all went onto snapchat. (Or whatever it is undergrad college kids use nowadays)

I then heard a conversation that went like this - ?

“Instagram pe I don’t know why I keep getting ads for Souled Store”

"Bro, coz you must be shopping from there or similar places na? So obviously targeted ads toh aayenge hi”

“Arre haan, Woh toh hain”

“Anyway, show me na. I wanted to buy a T-Shirt. I only get ads from Airtel just because I thought of switching last month”

It's amazing how much we’ve made algorithms and recommendation engines a part of our lives. We’ve just accepted it as a natural consequence of living in a hyper-connected world and for the most part, I think it’s actually quite incredible.

So, this is not me hating on targeted ads or algorithms or anything like that. Instead, this is just me wondering –

Wtf happened to serendipity?

Here are a few scenarios –

·???????You’re flipping channels on TV (heh, remember TV?) and came across an intriguing historical-fiction movie. It wasn’t the typical genre of comedy movies you would have otherwise watched, but it seemed interesting nonetheless. Turns out you quite enjoyed it. You learned something about a new genre and in turn, something about yourself. ?

·???????You were walking down the road and it suddenly starting pouring heavily. You took shelter at a chai-tapri and to pass the time, bought a samosa. It wasn’t the normal samosa-stall you frequent but now that you were stuck you had no choice. Turns out, it was the best samosa you’ve ever had. And you found it out by chance.

I can go on with examples like these but I’m sure you get the drift just as I’m sure they’re relatable.

These accidents become "happy" because they lead to feelings of serendipity, which (there is substantial evidence to suggest) heighten enjoyment. When a product, service, or experience is positive, unexpected, and involving chance, the satisfaction with the same tends to be higher. Consumers feel that the encounter was a good surprise, make attributions to chance, and feel lucky that it happened – all of which we collectively call "feelings of serendipity."

Too often, as marketers we don’t realise that the profound joys of happy coincidences and serendipity are sacrificed at the altar of predictive analytics and performance marketing systems.

Is this desirable, though? I wonder if Washing Powder Nirma would have the same cultural impact today if its TVC was only shown to consumers who expressed interest in detergent. Would the iconic ‘Hamara Bajaj’ common-man's scooter ads even be shown to users who are NCCS ‘A’, Top-8 metro cities, 4-wheeler owners?

Is it a good thing that the advertisements and promotions that reach us – are hyper targeted to only us? In my opinion, therein lies a dichotomy.

See, people like to think of themselves as open-minded and rational. We like to believe that the choices we make are our own, the things we discover are ours to claim, and the preferences we cultivate are ours to nurture. Yet, evidence sometimes points in the other direction.

We like being nudged if it means one less choice to make. I read a study which measured consumer satisfaction using two platforms; one delivering movie recommendations and another delivering music recommendations. Compared to a condition where consumers chose for themselves, enjoyment increased when consumers received a movie or song delivered at random from a set of alternatives, researchers had previously selected. Increased enjoyment occurred because the seemingly randomly delivered product was thought to be a good surprise, attributed to chance and luck. In other words, serendipity was born.

How many times have we heard some variant of - "Spotify is so much better because the recommendations are amazing!"?

So maybe, we don’t like the idea that our digital life is governed by recommendation engines even if we very much like the recommendations themselves.

What are the consequences of things like this, though?

Over time, as individual choices are circumscribed by a smaller and smaller universe of inputs, the result is closed information loops that filter in sameness and filter out randomness.

So, what happens then?

Examples from my own ‘digital profile’ -

• Politically, while I’m more issue-based than ideology based, I tend to lean more left than right. I notice that I see much more left-leaning content that supports my world view than right leaning content. (The credible sort, anyway. Not the daily 9pm primetime hatemongering).

Now, is this a case of algorithms giving me the kind of content I like and would want to consumer? Yes.

Is it also closing off my access to diverse viewpoints and preventing me from readily forming a holistic opinion in a time of increasing political polarisation? Sadly, also yes.

• ?As far as shopping goes, I keep seeing online ads for only the categories of product that I am looking for (obviously). Amazon’s “Because you brought ABC, we recommend XYZ” – while of course helpful, restricts the chances for serendipity in my own discovery of thing things I buy and use. Fashion wise, recommendations such as the ones I get, might actually narrow my potential for personal style by refining the results so well that there is no sense of whim, or allure of outside influence, or even impulse.

In our zeal for ever more precise targeting of content and advertising, in our determination to give people exactly what we think they should want, do we risk losing the magic of serendipity?

How do we get it back?

How do we reach a compromise wherein we can agree that recommendations and algorithms are actually pretty great at separating the wheat from the chaff, but we also want the magic that randomness provides?

I think there may be a few ways. And there may be a few lessons for me as a marketer here too.

At the root of serendipity, to some extent anyway, is a feeling of surprise. Fundamentally, it needs to be ‘unexpected’. An unexpected positive experience is exponentially better than an expected positive experience.

So, if we can recreate the conditions for serendipity, for discovery - that’ll work just fine.

Perhaps this is why Netflix, somewhere along the way, realised that their customers may have been getting overwhelmed with the plethora of titles on the platform, and introduced the ‘Surprise Me’ feature – that randomly plays a title (from a pre-decided list, of course). So that it gives you the feeling of having discovered something randomly.

Maybe it also explains the rise of D2C brands that offer subscription-based fashion boxes on delivery every month. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to get, but you roughly know the vibe and that’s more than enough for you to feel like you’ve got something unexpected. It’s probably, to a limited extent, explains why thrifting is so big on Instagram right now.

It’s probably why all these indie-travel pages on social media keep saying “Check out this hidden gem of a restaurant we found in north Goa!” The idea of it being hidden and therefore unknown to a larger public gives me the feeling of discovery, of encountering something no one else I know has. (Doesn’t matter that the damn restaurant has a massive LED signboard and is on google maps for anyone to find. It’s a ~~HiDdEn GeM~~, so it must be worth my time)

I think for marketers, it’s an interesting idea to not play all the cards you hold and give people the capacity to be surprised and ‘discover’ pleasant things about your brand for themselves. (Even if it means you have to place it right under the consumers nose) Sometimes this is easier said than done. Because if you have a feature or a USP, you want to make damn sure that everyone knows about it. Holding back can seem counter-intuitive. Yet, it could be the key satisfied customer experiences developed serendipitously.

Structuring marketplace encounters to seem more serendipitous, as opposed to letting the customer always choose on their own, can be the sweet spot.

For example, if I find out that a complimentary bottle of champagne is included as a part of my vacation package because I bought package A and not B, it’s bound to make me perceive it more positively. If Blue Tokai sends me samplers of a new upcoming craft chocolate brand when I make my routine order, it’s bound to make me think of them favourably the next time I want to buy coffee. This goes beyond freebies.

I remember that Sony didn’t really advertise the fact that you could use the PS3 as a home-entertainment solution. They only spoke about the gaming prowess of the console. So, for a customer, once I, on my own seek out information about the PS3, beyond what the brand communicates to me, it's a lovely discovery for me to know that this also has so much more to it. This is something I “discovered” so my purchase intent is now higher.

Surprising customers goes beyond “customer delight” or whatever other buzzword keeps trending from time to time. For example, I work at Niyo. While we promote a lot of our features and USPs of the product (and there are several), we’re carefully calibrated in what we’re putting out from a messaging PoV. So, when you open your account (because of the 7% interest, or lounge access, or UI or whatever feature appealed to you most) it’s a pleasant surprise to discover that you can also track your EPF seamlessly in the same dashboard. (EPF? That thing that gets deducted from your salary every month and you’ve never bothered to see how much it’s accumulated to. That thing.) And we know that it’s bound to be a pleasant (and therefore a serendipitous discovery) because who doesn’t like to discover that they have more money than they thought they did?

Strategically advertising your brands’ USP but holding back just enough so as to let customers discover facets to your brand you never told them about – that’s the closest we can get to recreating that sense of randomness.

Of course, true serendipity can never be replicated, and that is not the idea I’m proposing. It’s just that rather than lamenting its death in the age of performance marketing and hyper-targeting, I’m trying to look for ways in which the entire process can be less abrasive and more… human.

Perhaps brands should also eliminate marketing communications that highlight the targeting process, avoiding telling consumers that a product was especially selected for them based on what the company knows about their preferences. In such instances, an attribution to chance is replaced by attribution to being watched and targeted by the company.

Maybe the digital world has space for serendipitous experiences to flourish. Maybe we’ll grow out of the idea that all messaging has to only go to who we think the targeted audience is. Maybe we’ll look at RoI a little more holistically when we run marketing campaigns online.

Widely distributed marketing was once part of out collective cultural lexicon. It’s why I know you undoubtedly sang the Nirma jingle in your head when you read it in the first paragraph.

Perhaps we can get to a point where we celebrate the efficiency of targeting, for the brand, without sacrificing the magic of serendipity, for the consumer.

I’ll work on solving this problem. But not right now.

I got a Zomato notification that says “Donuts are waiting in your cart. Donut abandon them!”

So punny! I might as well just order those donuts now. I was browsing Zomato for donuts yesterday anyway.

Heh. These Zomato notifications are so QuiRkY ya!