You are creating expectations for people. There’s no way around it. Every interaction, and every lack of interaction contributes toward an expectation, a prediction of what it’s like to interact with you.

You have no choice in whether or not to create expectations for people. But you do have a choice as to the direction of those expectations.

It’s called foreshadowing.

You might be doing it on purpose, and you might be doing it inadvertently. You might be creating expectations that set you up to succeed, or that set you up for a fall.

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story. Foreshadowing often appears at the beginning of a story, or a chapter, and it helps the reader develop expectations about the upcoming events. […]

This literary device is generally used to build anticipation in the minds of readers about what might happen next, thus adding dramatic tension to a story. […]

Hints may be about future events, character revelations, and plot twists to create mood, convey theme and building suspense, usually to hint the good events that will likely cross paths or happen to the main character later on.

Wikipedia

When building a customer experience, you can use foreshadowing as a way to whet their appetite for your service, building excitement and anticipation for a future event.

Foreshadowing might take place during your sales cycle, foreshadowing a good event around the moment of purchase, and in-so-doing create momentum in the sale toward that moment of purchase, or foreshadowing might be used after a sale for customer retention by foreshadowing a change in the world as a result of the continued use of your product or service, or you can foreshadow payment terms or customer obligations and thus reduce friction.

If done correctly, foreshadowing will either increase excitement in your customer around the idea of being your customer, or it will reduce or remove friction and pain.

However, if you don’t pay attention to foreshadowing it will bite you because then you’re not in control of the narrative of expectation that’s that’s building in the mind of your customer, and the moment that what you deliver deviates substantially from their expectations you will induce a reward-prediction error which tanks their dopamine and creates a really bad experience for them. It doesn’t matter if that was the result of a misunderstanding or not, they’ll feel awful, and the cause of the feeling will be you.

Being intentional about foreshadowing is particularly important for high-end and luxury brands because consumers automatically have higher expectations. Get this wrong at your peril.