Monday 15 February 2016

Understanding the art of being remarkable

This is not a post about being remarkable in life or some self help kind of advice, this is something that will make you realize how you can perceive the word "remarkable" a bit differently and more importantly how you can utilize that perception in improving your products and spreading your ideas to more and more people. Also I will give you examples of how I implemented this thing in psycho store myself.


When someone says that something is remarkable, the first thing that comes to mind is something that is considered to be superior in its class, but what we fail to realize is that how remarkable can simply mean something that would force a person to make a "remark" about it. Something that would make the user feel 
"Hey wait, this is something different!", so that he/she can later on tell his/her friend
"You know that thing was different from what it was supposed to be." and that's how your product will advertise itself through word of mouth.
I am not saying that your whole product needs to be remarkable, the key here is to make the experience of using the product remarkable. You have a finite set of interactions that the user will do with your product, now its up to you to make something happen in that interaction due to which it will get registered in the user's mind. The reason being that the user already has a set of expectations from your product, which comes from comparing your product to your competitors. Now a positive effect of getting noticed will be possible only in the case of you exceeding those already set expectations, failing which a remark may be generated but which will obviously be negative for you or majority of the time no remark at all. Let me explain what I mean by giving examples on how I utilized this myself when working on psycho store.
So Psycho Store being yet another eCommerce clothing site, is bound to generate some fixed assumptions which the user have acquired after using other clothing sites. Now our job is to surpass those expectations in order to get the users attention. We just can't afford to remain plain old same, especially in the startup world.
For eg: Now keep in mind that psycho store is a brand that focuses on gaming/anime merchandises. So during checkout, when the user will be expecting to apply discount code, he/she will notice that there is no option for a discount code, but instead it asks for a "cheat code", which will obviously strike a special chord in every gamer, and just by its side, there is a button named HINT!, you take your mouse over to that button and it says "What is the Konami Code?" Now if you remember the Contra's 31 lives cheat code, then well and good otherwise you google the code, do some trial and error and voila you get 10% off.





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Now imagine the happiness in the users mind, he must be feeling as if he has unlocked some mystery or solved a puzzle just like he/she does in a game. Now simply by being a little different (in a better way) we managed to connect with the user's mind in a way that will make him remember us and narrate this experience to his friends who share similar interests.
Another example will be the confirmation mail that the user is expecting to get. But in psycho store along with the usual confirmation mail, you get another mail, once you start reading it you realize that its a short story with a cliffhanger ending and in the end it's written "The Story continues on your next order". The best part was when I myself saw two people talking about psychostore in Instagram comments, saying "Did you get that short story in the end, that was so cool." and the other person replying how "he loved the thank you sticky note inside the box" Now this proves that these memories stayed with them and made a positive impact on their mind. Now there are tons of other small things that we have added as well, like adding a small hand written thank you sticky note in the box or the packaging box itself which is a cylindrical box and not the usual polythene bags. 
Showing some sales statistics on the site like the last order with a graph showing from which state most orders come or which game's merchandise sells the most, now the user is not used to getting this kind of information from similar sites, so when something like this happens, it makes the user alert and take note of it. Now I can either tell you all these things that we have implemented or you can go and experience it yourself, which in my opinion will be a better thing to do.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is not necessary to do exceptionally big out of the box things, you can achieve it by focusing on the small details that make up your whole experience. Now another important point to be kept in mind is that all these things need to gel together as a whole and should not feel like an odd one out thing, like we added the cheat code thing because we focus on gaming merchandises, if we were selling formal shoes, then cheat code won't have made much sense.
Now imagine running naked down the street, it will surely get you noticed and a lot of people will remark about it right, but does it accomplish anything?
With the multitude of options and information overwhelming our brain everyday and reducing our attention span, there is just no more room for being average anymore.



So go out and do something that's worthy of a remark. I will highly recommend this video by Seth Godin to understand the idea much better and to gain some new ones as well.

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