Exceed all expectations

Another gem from the genius - The expectation paradox.

My take:
Most things in life follow the bell curve. There are minimum and maximum limits set and rest everything (most everything) falls in the normal zone.

What Seth refers to as the paradox is in reality the marketers inability to set the expectation bar in the realistic zone. Marketers' near paranoia of swinging to the lower extreme and missing out "trial" opportunities shows up in their over-correction. Result?

Overpromises.

Often this over-correction is a knee jerk to competitive pressures.Remember my What is weirdness: Seth Godin asks mere mortals ?

Even if your execution capability tends towards the maximum limit of the bell curve, the expectations still need to be set near normal and not to the maximum.

That is the trick to undersell and overdeliver. Be promising enough to generate interest but Exceed all expectations. That's the end-game.

Or should be.

P.S: Haven't been active on the blog for a while. Reason: Have traversed across continents in the process of settling down in Australia. Hope that in the future I do some reasonable expectation-execution math myself!