Brands do this all the time. They get nervous, like that new waitress, and start to over-explain. They don’t trust that people will understand, so they spell it out. Every word. Every feeling. Every intended reaction.
I was sitting in a little cafe, summer, the front of the place was open to the streets, and the patio was full of guests casually enjoying a beautiful, sunny Saturday afternoon. I was reading a book and sipping an adult beverage, and I heard the waitress tell the table of twelve behind me that it was only her second day as a server. I looked up from my book and caught a glimpse of a short, slim, dark-haired girl with a pleasing, if not nervous, smile. She had just taken their drink orders, and as she turned from the table, someone said, “Take your time, be careful.” She turned back, nodded, and assured them all would be fine.
What followed was predictable. Not just to me, but to anyone who had ever seen a rom-com, a viral video, or witnessed a server on their first day with an enormous drink order and a nervous shake. She carried a huge tray of drinks toward the table and, of course, she spilled the tray, glasses shattering, patrons fleeing, screams, laughs, and the like filled the cafe—and I looked on, all along thinking, well, that was predictable.
Because it was, I or anyone could have predicted that the small girl, on day two of her serving journey, would attempt to carry a huge tray of drinks because she wanted to do her job well. She wanted to show her fellow workers she was capable and not going to be a weak link. She had put so much pressure on herself that she practically willed the event to happen. It was predictable. The entire event was predictable; however, it wasn’t obvious. Meaning we all knew she was going to drop a drink, spill a drink, forget a drink, or cause the table of twelve some kind of discomfort. What wasn’t obvious was how.
We’ve all witnessed this in a movie, TV show, or film. We see the setup. A character makes a big show out of something, like: I am leaving the last slice of cheesecake in the fridge to reward myself after this day of hell I’m about to embark on. Now, the predictable part is, someone or something is going to eat or ruin that piece of cheesecake—it’s a given. The actors set it up. It’s predictable; what it’s not is obvious, and it shouldn’t be. It’s fine to let the audience in; then they are waiting for it. What’s not good is allowing the audience to get ahead of you and figure out how it’s going to happen.
If the character says, “I am saving this last piece of cheesecake for later, and I am looking forward to it. So don’t any of you let the dog, who has figured out how to open the fridge, eat it,” that, right there, makes the situation obvious. Now we know that the dog is going to eat the cake. We will still laugh at the dog opening the fridge, but it won’t be as fun and exciting because it’s now obvious. The audience has already played the entire scene out in their heads because we’ve been told the dog knows how to open the fridge. It’s no longer predictable and open, and fills the audience with “I wonder how the cake will be eaten,” because we know it’s the dog.
Now, if the character doesn’t make the big pronouncement about the dog, we all still know someone is going to eat or ruin the cake—that’s the predictable part, the part that keeps us glued to the show. The predictable part stays with us even when the action turns us away from the cheesecake, and it leaves us open for a great surprise.
After the character comes home from their comically awful day and finds the dog in the fridge eating the cheesecake, we get the laugh, and then, on top of that, we get the laugh when someone reveals the dog just learned how to open the fridge. Because the moment was predictable, it worked. If it had been obvious, it would have been less effective.
This was true with our waitress, laden with a massive tray of drinks. Predictable: she would spill them. Not obvious, so we had no idea how.
Now, I would have guessed a balance problem. She would get to the table, remove a glass of beer, thus throwing off the balance of the beverages on the tray. The tray would tip, she’d try to recover, and the tray would fall. However, she surprised us.
She approached the table with predictable fear, moving slowly, overcautiously. She stood before the table, removed a glass from the tray, and then the tray began to tilt. This is where the surprise came. She tried to get herself more under the tray to regain balance, and it caused her to chase the tray. She moved away from the table and started trying to restore balance while she moved around the room. People stood up, people tried to help, and she continued to move around trying to adjust the tray. Finally, her attempt brought her onto the patio, where she tripped over a dog and tossed the entire tray of drinks, minus one, on a well-dressed man walking by the cafe, looking at his phone. Not in a million years could I have predicted that.
If, for some reason, she had said, “Can someone take that dog out of the cafe? I’m afraid I’ll trip on him,” then the situation would have become obvious. She will trip on that dog.
Predictability is fun and gives the viewers a little game to play. Obvious does all the work, spoon-feeds the audience, removes the mystery, and usually kills the joke.
With brands, the same thing can happen.
When Brands Get Too Obvious
Brands do this all the time. They get nervous, like that new waitress, and start to over-explain. They don’t trust that people will understand, so they spell it out. Every word. Every feeling. Every intended reaction.
You’ve seen the ads. The couple looks at each other and smiles while a voice says something like, “Because love means never settling for less.” The product appears, the music swells, and you know exactly how you’re supposed to feel. It’s the marketing version of, “Don’t let the dog eat the cheesecake.”
The trouble is, when brands explain everything, there’s no room left for the audience. No small mystery to solve. No internal click that happens when a person makes the connection themselves. People love that little click. It’s what makes them lean forward.
Think about movie trailers that show the whole plot. You might still watch the movie, but you already know where it’s going. The tension’s gone. The fun is gone. You’ve been told exactly what will happen, and even if the story is good, it won’t hit the same.
The same thing happens when a brand gives away too much too soon. When the story in the ad, the message on the website, and the headline on the billboard all say the same thing, word for word, it’s not reinforcing the idea. It’s flattening it.
Predictable is good. People like knowing what to expect from a brand — tone, personality, attitude. Obvious is when you tell them what they already know before they’ve had a chance to feel it.
Here’s an example. You can spot an obvious rebrand a mile away. A company updates its logo, rolls out a new tagline, and floods every channel with messages like, “We’re changing for you.” They’re trying so hard to tell you they’ve changed that it feels forced. You can see the sweat.
Then there are brands that let you notice the change. They tweak a color, shift their language, let a new tone emerge in the social posts before saying anything official. You start to feel something different, but you can’t quite name it yet. That’s predictable — you still recognize them — but not obvious. It’s the sweet spot.
Brands that trust the audience win. They give people space to connect the dots. They let a message unfold instead of hammering it in. When a brand tells you exactly what to think, you tune out. When it lets you discover the meaning yourself, you stay interested.
It’s the difference between a magician explaining the trick before doing it and one who just smiles and says, “Watch this.”
The Power of Predictable (Done Right)
Predictable isn’t a bad word. In fact, it’s the thing that makes people trust you. Nobody walks into their favorite coffee shop hoping the barista suddenly starts juggling or decides to serve soup. They go because they know what they’ll get.
Predictability gives a sense of rhythm. It’s the heartbeat of a brand — steady, familiar, grounding. People want to recognize something they already like. The surprise should live inside that familiarity, not replace it.
Think about Apple. Every launch, every event, every product reveal follows the same pattern. Clean visuals, confident pauses, that slightly self-satisfied grin when they show something shiny. You can predict the beats. But inside those beats, there’s always one reveal that catches you — a new feature, a fresh design, a little shift in how they frame the future. Predictable form. Unexpected detail. It keeps the trust alive without killing curiosity.
Or take Coca-Cola. The message has barely changed in a century. It’s always about connection, joy, and shared moments. That’s predictable — and people love it. But they keep it fresh by changing the lens: one year it’s families, one year it’s music, one year it’s a polar bear on a mountain of ice. The pattern stays; the surface shifts.
That’s the balance brands miss when they confuse consistency with boredom. Predictability doesn’t mean static. It means reliable enough for people to lean in, but loose enough for something new to happen.
In the same way the waitress’s stumble became memorable because we didn’t know how she’d spill the drinks, brands should leave space for discovery. The audience knows you’ll make an ad. They know you’ll post on social. They know you’ll tell a story about your product. But if they can’t predict how you’ll do it this time, they’ll keep watching.
Predictable sets the stage. Surprise steals the show. Together, they make the moment worth remembering.
Why We Can’t Help Ourselves
No brand starts out wanting to be obvious. It just happens. You get too close to your own story and start worrying that people won’t get it. You’ve been staring at the work for weeks or months, so every detail feels essential. You begin to explain everything — not because you don’t trust your audience, but because you’re scared they’ll miss the point.
It’s a very human instinct. Nobody wants to be misunderstood. Nobody wants to put something into the world and have people shrug because they didn’t “get it.” So the copy gets longer. The headline gets safer. The idea gets wrapped in layers of reassurance.
What starts as clarity slowly turns into control. You polish away all the uncertainty — the little gaps where curiosity could live. And without those gaps, the message can’t breathe.
We do this in life, too. When we’re nervous, we overexplain. When we want to impress someone, we talk too much. When we care about how something lands, we try to script the reaction. Brands aren’t any different. They want the audience to feel a specific thing, so they push too hard to make it happen.
But great stories — and great brands — work because they leave space. They trust the people on the other side to meet them halfway. That’s where the connection happens. Not in the words you hand them, but in the ones they fill in themselves.
The Takeaway
The waitress wanted to get it right. She wanted to show she could handle it, that she belonged. But in trying to control every step, she lost the balance that would’ve saved her. Brands do the same thing. They over-manage, over-explain, over-polish — and spill the moment they’re trying to perfect.
Predictability is what people lean on. It’s the trust, the rhythm, the feeling that says, I know who this is. Obviousness is what happens when a brand gets nervous and starts grabbing for control. It’s the difference between inviting people in and talking at them.
The trick is to hold both sides. Be predictable enough that people feel safe, but open enough that they’re still curious. Leave a few quiet spaces where the audience can connect the dots for themselves.
That’s what we help brands do at ThoughtLab — find that balance. We build stories that feel familiar enough to trust, but fresh enough to spark attention. The goal isn’t to surprise for the sake of surprise; it’s to make people want to keep watching, keep listening, keep believing you’ve got something worth saying.
In the end, it’s simple. Predictable earns trust. Surprise earns love. Together, they keep your story standing long after the tray hits the floor.
