Start­ing with two great exam­ples of mar­ket­ing through curios­ity (the Hot Wheels mys­tery car and Cal­i­for­nia Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Ander­son looks at how you can use ‘infor­ma­tion gaps’ to drive curios­ity and then inter­ac­tion with your cus­tomers.

Infor­ma­tion can be pre­sented in a man­ner that is straight­for­ward or curi­ous. If we opt for the lat­ter, we are guar­an­teed not only atten­tion, but likely higher engage­ment as well—curiosity demands we know more! What was known infor­ma­tion (a sim­ple coupon or another toy car option) that might have been ignored has been con­verted into some­thing unknown, some­thing mys­te­ri­ous, some­thing that demands resolution.

The arti­cle goes on to dis­cuss George Loewen­stein and his information-gap the­ory before offer­ing some advice on incit­ing curios­ity in your product:

If you want to make some­one curi­ous, make them aware of some­thing they don’t know. Find that infor­ma­tion you can use to tease peo­ple. Chances are, you’re either with­hold­ing all the spe­cific infor­ma­tion or giv­ing it all away. To get atten­tion and engage the senses, look for ways to turn these direct mes­sages into a quest to be completed.

It’s no sur­prise that curios­ity can be a pow­er­ful tool, as some recent research is sug­gest­ing that infor­ma­tion is as much a reward as thirst, neu­ro­log­i­cally speaking.

Dopamine neu­rons are thought to be involved in learn­ing about rewards — by adjust­ing the con­nec­tions between other neu­rons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neu­rons also teach the brain to seek out infor­ma­tion so that their activ­ity becomes a sort of “com­mon cur­rency” that gov­erns both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.

via @bfchirpy