I think about the little things a lot. The little things are what made Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm work. They’re why a good meme lands. Some tiny, universal thing we all recognize. Most of the time the little things are just funny, or mildly annoying, and they don’t add up to much.
But this is a marketing blog, and in marketing the little things aren’t so little. Two of them crossed my path recently and made me go hmmmm.
The first: I got an invoice from a service where tipping isn’t customary, and there on the invoice was the option to leave one. Some people like to tip when it isn’t expected. I have a friend who’s always handing cash to the plumber or the cable tech, and I think it’s great that he does. But that’s a thing he chooses to do. It isn’t asked of him. When the ask is built right into the invoice, it lands differently. Now I’m deciding whether saying no makes me look ungrateful, or like I’m rating the work as less than great. I’m sure none of that was the intent. The option was probably added as a convenience. But it turned a perfectly fine interaction into a slightly awkward one. And every interaction with your brand is marketing.
And it’s not just me. Tipping fatigue has a name now, a couple of them actually: “tipflation” and “guilt tipping.” Roughly two-thirds of people say they’re worn out by being asked to tip everywhere, and about the same share feel the squeeze when a screen or an invoice nudges them to tip where they didn’t expect to. So that little flicker of awkwardness I felt isn’t rare. It’s the rule.
The second: I passed along some critical feedback about a service. It wasn’t my own experience, but one I’d paid for on behalf of others, and one of them had a genuinely bad experience. The job was left clearly half-finished; there was no missing it. What came back wasn’t “we dropped the ball, let us make it right.” It was an explanation for how it happened that took some of the fault off them, one that didn’t quite hold up. There was an apology in there, and even an offer to make it good, but both were buried at the very end, behind the excuse. By then it was too late. The explanation had already done its work, and I came away feeling like I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. Which is not how you want a customer to feel after they’ve worked up the nerve to tell you something went wrong.
Here’s the thing. Am I particular? Sure. But plenty of your customers are too, so the point isn’t me. In both cases, the company was busy answering the wrong question: “are we technically in the clear?” Yes, the tip option is allowed. Yes, maybe the mess could be explained away. But “are we justified?” and “how will this make our customer feel?” are two different questions, and only one of them keeps people coming back. I’m not asking whether these things are right, or fair, or defensible. I’m asking the other one. The question I’d invite you to ask about your own business, right down to the smallest touchpoint:
How will this make my customer feel? Grateful, or uncomfortable? Taken care of, or a little less than?
That feeling is what sticks. People forget the details and remember the emotion. And it’s the emotion that decides whether they stay and refer you, or quietly slip away. Every interaction sets a feeling. Every interaction matters.
