Disappointment doesn't often make it onto briefs. It gets edited out somewhere between the insight and the objective and replaced with something more palatable, like "reassurance." Which is strange, because your audience felt it this morning. They felt it at Christmas. They felt it at the match, at the restaurant, at the moment the player they loved announced he was leaving.
Here are nine tactics from the Storytelling Engine where disappointment wasn't the obstacle — it was the opening.
Tactics in this article:
- Trade the letdown for something better
- Solve the disappointment before it happens
- Name the category's dirty secret
- Give disappointment a physical stage
- Recruit fans to pressure the problem upstream
- Redirect the feeling into a new loyalty
- Make disappointment the premise and the punchline
- Insure the micro-moment
- Use the future disappointment they haven't felt yet
1. Trade the Letdown for Something Better
Acknowledge the disappointment directly — then make your brand the obvious exit route.
Skittles Holiday Pawn Shop — Wrigley/Skittles, Mediacom, 2019
Mediacom found that 75% of Canadians had been disappointed by a bad holiday gift. So they opened a physical Skittles Holiday Pawn Shop where people could trade their unwanted gifts for Skittles. It took a moment of private, slightly awkward experience — the terrible gift, the polite smile, the silent vow to never use it — and turned it into a public transaction with a cheerfully absurd logic. Skittles didn't fix the gift problem. It just made itself the better deal.
