“When people expect me to go right, I'll go left. I'm unpredictable." ~Paula Abdul 
Mutt Lange may be one of the most accomplished music song writers and producers you have never heard of. He’s helped create the success of bands such as AC/DC with Back in Black (approximately 22 million U.S. copies sold), Def Leppard with Pyromania (over 10 million U.S. copies sold) and of his former wife, Shania Twain with Come On Over (over 20 million U.S. copies sold). 
If Mutt Lange were a content developer for your company, I bet he’d be worth his weight in gold in helping create remarkably sticky stories, videos and music. While I am not an expert on his production techniques and since “he has not given an interview of any kind for decades,” what I’ve recognized about him is that he’s has mastered using the unexpected. While there are many techniques he’s used to success, my two favorite examples are: He starts songs with unusual sound combinations that grab your attention:
- Any rock music listener immediately knows the introduction to Hell’s Bells with its tolling church bell (a church bell in a hard rock song?!?);
- Any country & western listener immediately knows the introduction to Man I Feel Like a Woman! with its sing-song keyboard intro + “Shania’s call “Let’s go girls” then cutting into an electric guitar pulse (a pulsing electric guitar in a C&W song?!?);
- And of course the introduction to Rock of Ages with it’s gibberish “gunter glieben glauchen globen”) followed by a cow bell overlayed with a funky drum beat (a cow bell and a funky drum beat in a hard rock song?!?)
He uses a call and response technique that draws the listener in to participate
- Rock of Ages: rock on / (rock on!) … What do you want? / (What do you want?!);
- Loverboy’s Lovin’ Every Minute Of It: Ready (Ready!)-Aim (Aim!)-Fire
And almost without exception, the successful songs where he demonstrates these techniques end up sounding FUN and easily surprise and delight the listener. 
Part of the fun also stems from the fact that heavy rockers such as AC/DC and Def Leppard have been convinced to take a risk with their sound and to break from a style that was common, expected, and what every other band in their genre was producing. In doing so, they produce content (e.g., music) that gets noticed, that gets commented on, and that in the equivalent of their days, went viral. Roy Williams has written about the concept of surprising Broca’s Area in his book “Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads." In short, Williams states that Broca’s Area is a sort of gatekeeper of the brain’s information gathering function. Broca's area anticipates the predictable and the only way to pass and gain attention is from the use of surprising and attention grabbing words and sounds. The good news for you and me is that there are a wide range of successful people and businesses we can emulate. These content developers take seemingly mundane activities and turn them on their ear to create unexpected, and often, remarkable content that their fans and loyal customers soak up and pass along to their friends. For example: • Southwest Airline uses unexpected speeches to provide safety instructions ; • Seth Godin writes business management books that use peculiar language such as “lizard brain,” “linchpin,” “meatball sundae” and “purple cow;” • Dyson makes vacuums that look like robotic equipment ; • Humphry Slocombe, an ice cream shop in San Francisco, gives its flavors names such as Government Cheese, Foie Gras, Collaborative Evil Ale, Skull Splitter Root Beer, and Secret Breakfast (made from bourbon and cornflakes). Where are the touch points with your customers that they’ve come to expect a routine from you, and how can you deliver some unexpected fun? If you're a retailer, you can do something as simple, yet powerful, as changing your menu design and layout. You’d be amazed at how few of your regular customers bother to look at it anymore and how much you can change behavior significantly (upsell, cross-sell?) by featuring new items or delivering new messaging. Using the unexpected to create surprise in the products you create, the names you give them, the titles you give to your blog posts, heck, even the ways in which you answer the phone, may feel risky to you. And to some degree they are. If you were to conduct market research to see if some of these changes are well received, you may get terrible purchase interest scores and decide that it’s not a smart idea, not brand consistent, not worth the risk. But then again, if you keep doing the same things that your competitors do, you’re not really very different, are you?