Steven Bartlett has interviewed hundreds of the world’s most successful people on The Diary of a CEO.
After every single one of those first 200 interviews, he did something his guests never expected.
He had a custom photo book made — during the conversation — and handed it to them as they left.
Jimmy Fallon got one. He got in his car. And he cried.
That’s not a customer experience strategy. That’s not a “surprise and delight” checklist item. That’s a brand signal. A deliberate, repeatable act that says: I see you. This moment mattered. You are not just another guest.
And it built one of the most talked-about podcasts — and one of the most powerful media empires — on the planet.
I first codified this idea in Chapter 31 of Brand Intervention in 2017. At the time, it was an observation of human nature and a study in dichotomies. Today, it’s a blueprint — and the brands that discovered it have quietly built multi-million dollar empires around it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most branding conversations never reach:
It’s rarely the big swings that separate you. It’s all the tiny “right unexpected actions” competitors never think about.
What Most Brands Get Wrong About Differentiation
Ask any brand consultant what makes a brand different, and you’ll hear the same answers: better product, clearer positioning, stronger marketing.
Those things matter. But they’re table stakes.
The brands that become genuinely unforgettable (i.e., the ones that generate word-of-mouth without asking for it, that inspire loyalty that defies logic, that people defend in comment sections and recommend unprompted) all share one thing.
They are obsessed with turning ordinary moments into unforgettable ones.
Not every moment. The right moments.
This is what I call THE UNKNOWNS — that invisible layer of brand behavior that your competitors never suspect, never plan for, and never replicate. Because they’re not looking for it. They’re busy optimizing the visible stuff.
The Visible vs. The Invisible
Every brand has a visible layer: the logo, the website, the ads, the product, the pricing.
Competitors can see all of it. They can copy all of it. And most of them do.
But there’s an invisible layer: the layer where brand loyalty actually lives.
It’s the handwritten note inside the package when you expected nothing. It’s the follow-up call nobody asked for. It’s the detail that proves someone was paying attention when you assumed no one was.
These are the moments that live in memory long after the transaction is forgotten.
Neuroscience backs this up: unexpected positive experiences trigger a dopamine response that routine interactions simply cannot produce. The brain doesn’t just register the moment – it encodes it. That’s why people remember the time a brand surprised them years later, but can’t recall a single ad that brand ran.
But here’s where most brands get this wrong: they treat these moments as spontaneous acts of kindness. Random. Unplanned. Nice when they happen.
The brands that win treat them as strategy.
The “Right Unexpected Action” Is Not Random
There’s a critical distinction between a random act of generosity and a “right unexpected action.”
Random acts can be forgettable. They feel disconnected from who you are. A discount code sent after a complaint doesn’t feel like a brand — it feels like damage control.
A right unexpected action has three properties:
1. It’s specific to the person, not the segment.
Steven Bartlett didn’t hand every guest a generic gift bag. He handed them a photo book from their conversation. A scrapbook of what just happened. The ultimate souvenir. The specificity is what made Jimmy Fallon cry. It’s why “generic surprises” are just throwaway noise. And why bespoke ones feel like we’ve truly been seen.
2. It’s consistent with your brand’s core obsession.
Bartlett’s brand is built on depth of human connection – going further than any other interviewer. The photo book isn’t a departure from his brand. It is his brand, made physical. The right unexpected action should feel inevitable in hindsight. Like, “Of course that brand did that.”
3. It happens at the moment your competitor would have stopped.
The interview ends. The product ships. The contract is signed. Your competitor closes the loop. The brand that wins asks: what would make this person remember this moment forever? And then does it. Bartlett had the book made while the guest was being interviewed and handed it to them as soon as the interview was done, while they were still in the studio.
The Brands That Proved It (And the Empire It Built)
When I introduced the UNKNOWNS framework in Brand Intervention in 2017, the premise was simple: the brands that will dominate the next decade won’t win on product or price. They’ll win on amplifying this invisible layer — the moments competitors never think to embrace.
What’s happened since then has exceeded even that prediction.
Steve Bartlett didn’t just build a podcast. He built FlightStory — a full-scale platform, media, and brand empire — on the back of exactly this philosophy. The photo book handed to every guest isn’t a nice touch. It’s the operating principle of an organization obsessed with making every human interaction unrepeatable. That obsession is now worth hundreds of millions.
Eleven Madison Park didn’t become the world’s best restaurant by having the best food. Eleven Madison Park became legendary by designing moments so specific, so unexpected, so deeply human that guests left feeling permanently changed. Their kitchen sends guests home with a jar of house-made, wrapped, personal granola. A $350 dinner ends with a $4 gesture. And that “little gesture” is what wasn’t expected, the exact thing people will talk about for years.
Chewy sends flowers when a customer loses a pet. Not a discount. Not a loyalty point. Flowers. With a handwritten card. Nobody asked them to. Their customer return rate and word of mouth are legendary.
Ritz-Carlton gives every employee a $2,000 budget (no approval required) to resolve a guest issue or create a moment. The policy isn’t about the money. It’s about signaling to every employee: you are empowered to make this person’s experience unforgettable. That’s a brand value, not a customer service policy.
Zappos quietly upgraded customers to overnight shipping without announcing it. The customer ordered standard. They got next-day. No email explaining it, no marketing message. Just the moment of opening a box a day earlier than expected and thinking: wait, what? That’s the moment that turned buyers into evangelists.
None of these are accidents. They’re designed behaviors that reflect a core brand belief: the relationship matters more than the transaction.
And every single one of them is a direct expression of what I laid out in Chapter 31 of Brand Intervention, years before these empires reached the scale they have today.
Why Your Competitors Will Never Copy This
Here’s the strategic genius hiding inside the UNKNOWNS:
They are extraordinarily difficult to reverse-engineer.
A competitor can see your pricing. They can copy your website. They can match your ad spend. They can hire your designers.
They cannot copy an organizational culture that is genuinely obsessed with the human being on the other side of every interaction.
That obsession either exists in your DNA or it doesn’t. You can’t fake it at scale. Customers feel the difference immediately between a brand that genuinely cares and a brand that has a “surprise and delight” line item in a quarterly marketing plan.
This is why the UNKNOWNS are the most defensible competitive advantage available to any brand.
Not patents. Not distribution. Not even price.
The way you make people feel when nobody told you to make them feel anything.
How to Find Your Brand’s UNKNOWNS
Start with a single question: What would make this person remember this moment forever?
Not “what’s expected.” Not “what’s efficient.” Not “what fits the budget.”
What would make them call someone they love and say: you won’t believe what just happened.
Here’s a framework to find your moments:
Map the handoff points. Where does your interaction with a customer technically “end”? After purchase. After delivery. After onboarding. After a support call. These are the exact moments where your competitors stop. These are your opportunities.
Ask what your brand believes. Not what it sells. What it believes. A brand that believes in human dignity will find different moments than a brand that believes in efficiency. The right unexpected action is always an expression of belief, not a tactic.
Make it specific. Generic gestures are forgettable. The more specific the gesture to the individual, the more powerful the memory. This requires paying attention. Which is itself a brand signal.
Build it into the system. The Ritz-Carlton $2,000 rule works because it’s a policy, not a personality trait. Bartlett’s photo book worked because it happened for 200 consecutive guests, not once. Systematize the behavior without mechanizing the feeling.
The Branding Truth Hidden in Plain Sight
I wrote Chapter 31 of Brand Intervention in 2017 because I watched too many brilliant brands lose to inferior competitors who simply understood something they didn’t: the invisible layer where loyalty (and delight) is actually built.
What I couldn’t have predicted was the scale at which this would prove true. FlightStory. Eleven Madison Park. Chewy. Ritz-Carlton. Zappos. These aren’t outliers. They’re the inevitable result of a brand that decided ordinary moments are an insult to what they could be.
The framework was always there. The question, then and now, is the same:
Are you building your brand in the visible layer, where everyone competes? Or in the invisible one, where almost no one does?