Key points for applying serendipity to product experiences:

• Serendipitous experiences are highly varied, but they share three common features. Encounters that produce serendipity are enjoyable, unpredictable, and inexplicable

• Designing for serendipity in product experiences requires marketers to omit the “why” behind the product encounter

• Serendipity can cultivate powerful feelings toward the product and brand, but it comes with its own risks and tradeoffs

Serendipity may feel like an odd emotion to think about in the context of marketing. It’s a special emotion. As we’ve seen, these rare chance encounters can sweep us off our feet; the origin stories of countless romances. But thankfully for marketers, serendipity isn’t just for love stories. With the right craft, it can also be layered into the product experience, and with powerful effect.

As we’ll see, designing for serendipity is no easy task. But when it comes off, it can create a special bond between the brand, product, and consumer. And in an era of hyper-personalization and high-touch curation, a little serendipity may be just the thing to set your consumer experience apart.

Let’s dive in

The Three Step Guide to Creating Serendipity in Marketing

Before examining product experiences specifically, lets take a step back and unpack serendipity more generally. Serendipitous experiences are vast and diverse. Anything from a romantic chance encounter, to a chain of events that feel too bizarre to happen at random. Serendipity feels like such nebulous, fleeting human emotion that it resists formulation.

But across the board, serendipity arises from experiences and encounters that share three core attributes:  

Enjoyable

Unexpected

Inexplicable

Let’s unpack each of these in turn:

• Step one - create an enjoyable experience! Serendipitous experiences are positive experiences. They feel as though the world is coming together just for us, and in an enjoyable way. Providing enjoyment is the easiest and hopefully most intuitive element. 

• Step two, create an unexpected experience. Serendipity involves unpredictability; they are surprising in nature. Research indicates that they involve low-probability events that the consumer could not have been predicted ahead of time. 

At this stage, we’ve got enjoyable, unexpected experiences. This is a great start. If you recall, this is the general formula for a pleasurable surprise. Recall: A good experience + a surprise = a great experience. This is a powerful combination in its own right, and finding ways to apply pleasurable surprises can be a powerful tool to enhance the customer journey.

However, serendipity goes one step further:

• The final ingredient is that the experience needs to be inexplicable. Serendipitous experiences have no obvious and immediate explanation. Not only is the event enjoyable and unexpected, but there’s no clear explanation for why it should be happening. There’s a degree of mystery to it, which provides the all-important fertile ground for serendipity to emerge. 

So there you have it, the basic ingredients are experiences that are enjoyable, unpredictable, and inexplicable. It’s this last attribute - inexplicable, that is most crucial. And also the most difficult to pull off. As we’ve seen from the neuroscience of serendipity, our need for closure is left unmet, allowing the brain’s natural meaning-seeking orientation to fill in. 

Let’s look at how this formula can be applied to a specific area of marketing: product experiences.

Applying Serendipity to Product Experiences

When designing for these product experiences, this is about resisting the drive to provide a clear explanation for a selection, and, instead, embracing a bit of ambiguity. This isn’t the default. It's natural, for example, for marketers to go out of the way to highlight the care and deliberation behind a bespoke selection. They'll tell consumers of a certain piece of clothing, for example, that "this was selected specifically for you". 

What does it mean to resist this, and instead, provide the opportunity for serendipity? Let’s look at a few specific scenarios:

Imagine being served a free, delicious piece of chocolate. It was free. It was delicious. The first box, enjoyability, is checked. Now imagine where this was first presented to you: in a candy shop, or in a bank? In which encounter would you enjoy it more?

Research indicates that it’s this second scenario, the bank, which is associated with more positive outcomes. Receiving chocolate in a candy store is more expected and much more explicable - they give them out there to entice you to buy chocolate! But at a bank? Much less expected (step 2), and crucially, much less explicable (step 3). Here, people experienced a greater sense of enjoyment, serendipity, and meaning from that product experience, even weeks later.

The idea here is to provide more opportunities for consumers to encounter your product where they may not necessarily expect it. Instead of handing out samples outside the brand’s store at the mall, why not venture out to the food court, or to the mall’s entrance? And importantly, resist giving an explanation as to why you’re stationed where you are. It’s the mystery of the situation which provides the opportunity for serendipity.

Serendipity and Consumer Personalization

More than ever before, marketers can use algorithms to hyper-personalize consumer experiences. Netflix and other streaming platforms provide unique recommendations based on your viewing history; Spotify gives you songs “just for you” based on your listening history. The list goes on. This algorithmic personalization has never been easier for marketers to pull off.

But should they?

There’s no right size fits all for all situations and industries. Personalization has its place. But research suggests that consumers enjoy a digital experience even more when it isn't so obviously delivered by an algorithm. Experiments have found, for example, that when they listen to a song they've selected on Spotify, they'll no doubt enjoy it. But they'll enjoy it even more when it comes up randomly. And then enjoy it even more than that when the chances of hearing it are very slim (such as when it comes up in a playlist of 10,000 songs, as opposed to a playlist of 20). A little serendipity can go a long way.

It's not necessarily the case that consumers are against algorithmic personalization, specifically. It’s that when they're given an explanation - any explanation - for why that experience or product was delivered, it obviates the opportunity for serendipity.

In many instances, such as in the scenario provided above, it's not eliminating the algorithm altogether. Instead, it's about turning down its salience. An advanced personalization tool might provide a good recommendation, but if it's highlighted too strongly, it limits the opportunity for consumer serendipity.

Serendipity and Marketing Tradeoffs

Serendipity is a rare human emotion. And when crafted carefully into the consumer experience, it can create product experiences that go above and beyond, ultimately forging a deep, meaningful connection with the product and the brand.

But as great as serendipity is, it's not without its tradeoffs. Designing for ambiguity isn't only difficult to pull off but it can also easily backfire. In an attempt to meet consumers in unexpected scenarios, for example, the efforts could easily target people well outside their target market. Or, if there's a sharp conflict between the product and the context, this could easily result in a negative overall experience. Handing out chocolate outside the mall bathroom might be unexpected and inexplicable but is likely not very enjoyable.

Equally, playing down the role of an algorithmic selection may reduce the quality of the selection (such as a song, or a movie). It simply may not result in a recommendation that aligns with the consumer's preferences. And if the product or experience isn't enjoyable, there's no opportunity for serendipity from the get-go. Recall that to produce serendipity, the experience must be unexpected, inexplicable, and also, crucially, enjoyable.

Another arena where serendipity may reach its limits is in gift-giving. It' no secret that people like getting gifts from friends and family, especially when they're carefully chosen. And when you highlight the personal nature of the gift is highlighted (e.g. I know how much you love turquoise!) you're trading sentimentality for serendipity. Is this a good trade? Is serendipity always better? Very hard to say.

There's no right answer for all situations. This underlies the fact that serendipity doesn’t take the place of good market research. It’s still crucial to understand the consumer, and to gauge their unique preferences. Serendipity isn’t a cure-all. It’s not a best practice to be applied ‘across-the-board’. Like many elements of consumer psychology, its a tool to be wielded when the scenario is right. But in a world dominated hyper-personalization and high-touch curation, introducing a bit of serendipity might just be the thing.

Photo by Alex Alvarez on Unsplash

More on the connection between marketing psychology, neuroscience, and serendipity in my TEDx talk:

References for Applying Serendipity to Marketing and Product Experiences

Kim, A., Affonso, F. M., Laran, J., & Durante, K. M. (2021). Serendipity: Chance Encounters in the Marketplace Enhance Consumer Satisfaction. Journal of Marketing, 85(4), 141–157

Berns, G. S., McClure, S. M., Pagnoni, G., & Montague, P. R. (2001). Predictability modulates human brain response to reward. Journal of neuroscience, 21(8), 2793-2798.

Kim, A., & Briley, D. (2020). Finding the self in chance events. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 37(4), 853-867.

Leung, E., Cito, M. C., Paolacci, G., & Puntoni, S. (2021) Preference for Material Products in Identity‐Based Consumption. Journal of Consumer Psychology.