You Do Not Need Botox To Raise Your Eyebrows 🤨
If thin and over plucked brows with high, rounded arches were the trademark of the '90s and early '00s, celebrities like Cara Delevingne, Taylor Hill, and Lily Collins brought to the 2010s thick brows with squared corners and feathered edges. Fast forward to this year, 2021, the so-called soap 🧼 brow trend technique has come along, taking over social media feeds in the form of selfies of brushed, slicked-up brows with a fluffy finish.
Populating TikTok videos and Instagram posts from influencers, celebrities, and makeup artists alike, the new soap brow trend is achieved by using a bar of soap and a spoolie to shape and keep your brows in place instead of a brow gel. Plenty of makeup 💄 artists like Linda Hallberg, who has one of the most popular soap brow tutorials on YouTube, have always preferred soap to groom the eyebrows during photo 📸 shoots because it holds the hair much stronger 💪, while this trick has been recently re-popularised by beauty bloggers. In addition, it is one of the most affordable beauty hacks out there.
If you are curious 🤔 to hop on the soap brow trend, be advised that you cannot just use any old soap that is lying around your bathroom 🚿. The most important factor you should take into consideration when looking for the right soap is glycerin, as it is known for its low pH level, so as to prevent eye irritation when applying the soap with a spoolie brush directly onto your brows. Also, ensure that you opt for a transparent soap in order to avoid leaving white residue in your eyebrow hair.
Where has the element of surprise gone? Most would spend so much time meticulously planning 🗓 out marketing campaigns. Subscribers tend to know when to expect your emails. Hmm.. how can you shock and amaze your customers in an era of knowing what is coming next? Well, surprise 😮 them!
Do something out of the ordinary that will get their attention 👀. It does not have to be expensive. Consider sending your contacts a sample of your product with a personal note 📝. Or you can also surprise a customer by showing up with lunch at their office one day. Even sending an e-card can be an effective way to say you are more than a customer to me - I value you!
You can even use digital tactics, namely share a customer’s blog post or social update, leave a great review for a business-to-business (B2B) client on a reviewing website like Yelp. or send an email with a link to an article that made you think 💭 of the contact. It is all about breaking out of that businesslike mode and finding human connection that makes your company more relatable and lovable.
Life has never been more predictable
“Big Data” is the latest buzzword in the marketing industry. Data-rich practices, namely econometric modeling, analytics and copy-testing offer brand managers an alluring promise of precision and predictability. Pull lever X, and it will result to Y popping out.
All of this is mostly good 😌. These tools can make your profession more efficient, but they also can make brands less exciting and surprising. You risk robbing brands of opportunities for serendipity with all of this information at your disposal - the delightful surprises that happen when you least expect them, attracting 🧲 the attention of customers.
Pursuing innovations in “big data” is important, but that does not mean you should ignore the element of surprise, because surprise is still probably the most powerful marketing tool of all. Here are 5 🖐 reasons why:
1️⃣ Surprise is addictive
Surprise is like cocaine for your brain 🧠. Scientists at Emory and Baylor used MRIs to measure the changes in the human brain activity in response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli, using fruit juice 🧃 and water 💧. The patterns of juice and water squirts were either predictable or completely unpredictable. The reward pathways in the brain responded most strongly to the unpredictable sequence of squirts, on the contrary to the researchers’ expectations.
Dr. Read Montague, an associate professor of neuroscience at Baylor, stated that the region lights 💡 up like a Christmas tree 🎄 on the MRI, which suggests that people are designed to crave the unexpected. Birchbox, a subscription service that sends customers a box of mystery beauty products each month, and Phish, a rock band that never performs the same show twice, proves that entire business models can be built around this insight.
2️⃣ Surprise changes behaviour
Surprise introduces us to new stimuli, which we must then reconcile with shifts in our beliefs and behaviour. Wael Asaad, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Brown University, stated that unexpected events drive 🚗 learning.
Innovative strategies can be unlocked 🔓 when desired customer behaviours are being thought of. We are often too focused on the question of “What do we need to say?” when developing an advertising campaign. Instead, we should focus on the question of “What expectations do our customers and prospects hold, and how can we turn those on their head?”.
3️⃣ Surprise is cheap
All it takes is a dime 🪙 to make someone’s day. A study in which a dime was placed near a copy machine, was carried out by a psychologist, Norbert Schwarz. The subjects’ overall satisfaction with life was substantially higher than the subjects who did not find a coin when they found the dime were surveyed shortly after their discovery. Marketers should think about how to cram surprising brand stories into the smallest 🤏 space possible rather than attempting to beat the competition with epic production budgets and media plans.
4️⃣ Surprise turbocharges emotions
Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotion classifies our feelings into primary emotions, namely anger 😡 or fear 😱, and more nuanced secondary emotions that combine these, like bittersweet (happiness + sadness) or guilt (happiness + fear). It appears to amplify whatever you are feeling, that is the interesting thing about surprise. We are outraged when we are surprised and angry. Combine happiness with surprise, and you hit the upper register of the feeling-good scale.
5️⃣ Surprise fuels ⛽️ passionate relationships
Whether it is sending a new lover flowers 💐 on a random Tuesday “just because”, or sealing the deal with a memorable marriage proposal 💍, romance is all about surprise. An experiment conducted among middle-aged married couples found that engaging in less common, but more exciting activities, like skiing or dancing, led to greater marriage satisfaction compared to pursuing activities that are more common and pleasant. For example, watching a movie 🍿 or cooking together.
The same principles apply to business relationships. Marketers spend the bulk of their creative energy making themselves look attractive to potential customers. Thus, it is easy to forget that you need to look sexy 💋 and charming to your current customers to continuously keep the spark ⚡️ alive.
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) need to push the brand organisation to be more surprising as well as push their staffs and agencies to be faster, cheaper and more accountable. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be much in the way of academic research 🧐 or enterprise-grade software to make this happen. It really comes down to a question of imagination 💭 and bravery, and it has something to do with being open to situations where you might be surprised yourself.
What are your thoughts on soap brows and keeping eyebrows raised in the marketing industry? Share your thoughts below 🤩😎.
References:
Cavallo, A. 2021, March 16. How to Get the Instagram-Favorite Soap Brow Trend. L'OFFICIEL.
Egg Marketing
Redick, S. 2013, May 10. Surprise Is Still the Most Powerful Marketing Tool. Harvard Business Review.
