The “guess what?” test: are you giving customers anything worth talking about?

Being good is not the same as being memorable

There is an uncomfortable part to Paul’s question. A garden centre can be very good and still be difficult to talk about. It can be tidy, well stocked and professionally run. The staff can be friendly, the coffee decent and the toilets clean. The customer might leave perfectly satisfied and have absolutely nothing interesting to say about the visit afterwards.

None of those basics is unimportant. If the car park is chaos or the café service is terrible, a memorable feature elsewhere is unlikely to rescue the experience. Competence is the starting point. But competence is also what customers increasingly expect, and there is a difference between leaving somewhere satisfied and leaving with something you want to tell somebody else about.

Paul gave the example of a café having a signature dish it becomes famous for. He jokingly suggested a lemon meringue pie a foot high. During the conversation, massive scones were thrown into the mix too. The particular dish is not the point. It is the idea of creating something specific enough for people to notice and remember, rather than serving a perfectly respectable version of the same things available everywhere else.

The memorable thing does not have to be extravagant. It might be the food, an event, an unusual product range, knowledgeable service, a brilliant display, something for children to do or a small detail that makes the whole visit easier. What matters is that it gives the customer something specific to attach to the experience.

I would not turn this into a demand that every visit has to create a jaw-dropping anecdote. Most purchases are fairly ordinary and there is nothing wrong with that. A packet of plant food does not need to become the subject of dinner-party conversation. The test is more useful if we ask whether there is anything unusually useful, enjoyable, desirable or distinctive enough that somebody could talk about it. “It was really nice” is not much of a guess what.

Physical retail needs reasons to be physical

Paul’s test becomes more interesting when you put it alongside another point he made in the interview: “There is absolutely no way we can compete head on against the internet in terms of choice.” He was talking about garden centres, but the point applies to physical retail much more broadly.

Trying to beat the internet by becoming a less convenient version of the internet does not feel like a particularly promising strategy. A website can offer more choice, make comparison easier and let someone buy from the sofa at ten o’clock at night. A physical place needs to make better use of the things being there can offer.

That might be expertise, discovery, hospitality, community, atmosphere or simply the pleasure of spending time somewhere. Paul talked about a line once used by Knights Garden Centres. Rather than leading with a piece of furniture and a price, the website showed a driftwood sign carrying the words “friends meet here”. He liked it because the thought was about people, not products.

I can see why it stayed with him. A garden centre that becomes somewhere people meet, eat, browse, take the children, get advice and spend part of their day has a different relationship with the customer from a retailer that is simply a physical catalogue. Paul’s view was essentially to get the people in, make sure they are happy, and let the shopping follow.

That could sound a little romantic if the rest of his interview had not been so commercially grounded. Paul also talks about sales per square metre, EPOS data, staffing, profit centres and the need to make existing space work harder before adding more. His phrase is “make it better before you make it bigger”. Memorable, in his version of retail, does not mean commercially naïve. The distinctive experience still has to earn its keep.

I’ve been thinking about Paul’s point again recently while reading Kevin Ervin Kelley’s Irreplaceable. Kelley explores a similar challenge from a broader perspective: if physical places are going to remain valuable in a world where convenience and choice increasingly belong to digital channels, they need to give us reasons to want to be there.

That feels particularly relevant to garden centres. They are never going to beat the internet on endless choice or the speed of finding a specific product. But they can offer expertise, discovery, food, community, inspiration and experiences that simply don’t translate in the same way to a screen. Paul’s “guess what?” test gives us an extraordinarily simple way of asking whether we’re actually making enough of that advantage.

We have borrowed the test for product brands

This is where Paul’s idea travelled beyond the original garden-centre conversation for me. At WO we now use a version of the same question when thinking about product brands:

“I bought [your product] and guess what…”

It is a surprisingly good way to test a proposition because it forces you away from the list of things the business would like to say and towards the thing a customer might actually remember.

Imagine a product with six benefits on the pack. It is effective, sustainable, easy to use, made in Britain, good value and supported by clever technology. All of those things may be true, and all may have a role to play. But if someone bought it, which part would they naturally tell somebody else about?

The “guess what?” might be a surprising result. It could be a clever format that removes a familiar frustration, how little space the product takes to store, how quickly it works, the fact it eliminates a job someone hates doing or even the way the product makes an otherwise dull category feel more desirable. Sometimes it will be the product itself. Sometimes it will be the packaging, the demonstration, the service, a guarantee or the way a difficult choice has been made simpler.

The rest of the information does not disappear. Evidence, reassurance and practical detail still matter. But the test can help identify the bit that carries the story. If the answer is difficult to find, there may be plenty of information but not enough of an idea.

That is particularly useful for challenger brands. If your product is sitting next to an established name with better recognition and a larger marketing budget, being broadly good is unlikely to be enough. You need to give the customer a reason to notice you and something simple enough to remember afterwards.

What do you want to be famous for?

There is another part of Paul’s interview that fits naturally with the “guess what?” question. He talked about asking garden centre owners a deceptively simple question: what type of garden centre are you? Once you have worked that out, he argues, a lot of decisions become easier.

The “guess what?” test approaches the same problem from the other direction. Instead of asking how the business describes itself, you ask what you would like people to say about it when you are not in the room. Not the full proposition. Not the values written on the wall. Just the thought that has survived the experience and travelled into another conversation.

For one garden centre it might be horticultural expertise. For another, food. For another, family days out, unusual plants or a strong local connection. There is no universally correct answer, and if every garden centre chose the same one the test would stop being useful. The value is in forcing a choice about what deserves to be remembered.

The same applies to product brands. Trying to be known for everything often results in being known rather vaguely for a lot of things. If there is one strong reason people talk about the product, the rest of the marketing has something to gather around. Packaging can make it obvious. Content can demonstrate it. Retail communication can reinforce it. The sales team can explain it to buyers. That is a lot easier than asking every channel to invent its own reason why the brand is interesting.

Then make the interesting thing easy to notice

There is one final part of Paul’s original answer that I think is important. Once you have created some good endings to the sentence, he says you need to tell people about them.

That sounds obvious, but plenty of businesses create genuinely good experiences and then market themselves in the most generic possible way. They talk about quality, choice, friendly service and competitive prices while the genuinely interesting thing about them is buried somewhere inside the business.

If your café really does serve the lemon meringue pie people drive across town for, show it. If your staff have exceptional horticultural knowledge, let customers see that expertise before they need it. If you have created a product that solves a problem in a completely different way, demonstrate the difference rather than surrounding it with broad claims.

Marketing cannot manufacture a compelling “guess what?” from nothing. But it can make sure the thing worth talking about is easy to notice and easy to repeat.

I think that is why Paul’s test has stayed with me. There are more sophisticated ways to analyse a brand or customer experience, and sometimes we need them. Research, data and commercial analysis can tell us things this question cannot. But sophistication is not always the same as usefulness.

“I went there and guess what…” is simple enough to use in a meeting without explanation. It immediately changes the point of view from what the business believes it offers to what the customer might actually remember. For garden centres, that is a useful test in a world where physical retail needs stronger reasons for people to turn up. For product brands, our version asks whether the proposition contains anything distinctive and meaningful enough to survive beyond the purchase.

So try finishing the sentence: “I visited our garden centre and guess what…” Or: “I bought our product and guess what…” If the answer comes quickly, you may have found something worth making more of. If it does not, that is useful too.