Delight is not the first word most marketers reach for. They talk about awareness, conversion, loyalty. Yet research from McKinsey & Company, based on 25,000 customers across industries, points to something far more human: delight, that fizzy mix of surprise and joy, is the single most powerful emotion a brand can trigger. It doesn’t just make people smile. It drives repeat purchases, cross-sells and upsells, and the kind of word-of-mouth money can’t easily buy.

Delight happens when a brand goes beyond a gimmick. Psychologists call it “incongruity resolution” — we encounter something that feels off, even absurd, and then our brain snaps the pieces into place. The moment it makes sense, we feel a rush of pleasure. The joke lands. A new truth clicks. And crucially, we remember who took us there.

Consider Frida, the parenthood brand that wanted to destigmatize breastfeeding and launch a manual breast pump. Instead of another earnest campaign, it introduced a “breast milk ice cream” flavor, complete with a tanker truck and the line “Just like mom used to make.” The initial reaction was disgust, then curiosity, then understanding: this was about normalizing something many parents experience in private. The stunt exploded across media and social platforms, and sales of the pump surged.

KFC took a quieter route to delight. To tease the return of its potato wedges, it mailed 70 creators a single raw potato in a glossy red box, stamped only with a date and the message “No matter how you slice it, something big is coming.” The absurdity begged to be shared. Most recipients posted about it, generating millions of unpaid impressions and turning a humble side dish into a social media event.

Personal care brand Billie leaned into discomfort too. To launch a coconut-vanilla scent, it covered New York billboards with giant scratch-and-sniff armpits. The idea of stopping on a busy sidewalk to sniff a stranger’s pit was mortifying, which made it irresistible. People laughed, sniffed, filmed and posted. The stunt transformed an everyday product into a public, sensory joke everyone was in on.

These campaigns share a simple formula: surprise, then sense-making, then joy. In a crowded marketplace, that emotional arc may be the most valuable asset a brand can create.