Super Bowl Commercial Experiment

A bit more on my Super Bowl commercial idea. A quick Google search on "Super Bowl Commercials" and you get around 296,000 results.

The first one you'll find is this.  An entire site dedicated to Super Bowl ads.  Don't miss the ironic TiVo ad towards the bottom of the page.

I've been searching for a list of companies planning to advertise this year.  As I mentioned earlier I'm pretty sure that any company that opts to advertise during this game will see a significant decrease in their stock price over the next few years.  I'll post the list as soon as I find one.

The Best Business Lesson Ever

Perception minus expectations equals satisfaction. I believe the first time I heard this was in reference to Disney World.

Disney's customers would spend hours waiting in line for a 2 minute ride.  They would enter the line really excited about the ride (high expectations).  But at the end, after waiting more for two hours, they felt like it was a waste of time (low perception).

So Disney had two choices:

1. Improve Perception (create a better ride/create more rides to reduce demand/let fewer people into the park.)  Or...
2. Lower Expectations (make it very clear upfront what the customer was getting into.)

You've already guessed that Disney went with the second option -- they lowered expectations.

They simply added a sign at the end of the line that would tell each customer approximately how long they would have to wait (I heard that they even added a few minutes to these estimates just to be sure that expectations were really low).

This was a brilliant (and nearly free) solution to a big problem.  The net effect was that satisfaction increased because expectations decreased -- the perception of the ride itself stayed the same.