The Make Them Curious Manifesto

Most B2B marketing arrives after the decision it was meant to influence.

A buying group forms a shortlist in private, using whatever it can find without speaking to anyone. By the time an enquiry arrives, the field has already been narrowed. The budget that fought for that enquiry was competing for a place that had been allocated months earlier.

That is a timing problem wearing the costume of a creative problem. No amount of craft applied at the enquiry recovers a company that was not memorable during the months of silence before it.

Interruption is a tax on the wrong people

Interruption works by paying to appear in front of everyone, to reach the few who are in market. The rest is waste by design, and the waste is priced in.

Shouting more softly changes nothing. It is to be the thing a buyer goes looking for during the private months. That requires being findable, being legible in seconds, and being worth the second click.

Curiosity is a mechanism, not a mood

Curiosity is the specific discomfort of a gap: knowing enough to sense there is something you do not know. It is not delight, and it is not surprise. It is an itch with a shape.

Which makes it buildable. Open a gap that matters commercially, then close it properly in the same piece of work. Open a gap and fail to close it and you have made a headline. Close a gap nobody had and you have made a brochure.

Everything below follows from that. Ten principles. Each one costs something, and the cost is stated.

The ten

01Say the thing that could be wrong

A claim that nobody could disagree with is not a claim. "We put customers first" cannot be contested, so it cannot be believed either. A position has to be falsifiable to be worth holding, which means somebody competent should be able to read it and say no. Cost: I lose the buyers who wanted reassurance. In practice, I write the sentence a rival could publish a rebuttal to, and I keep it in.

02Name the convention, not the competitor

Attacking a named company invites a fight the reader is not in, and it dates the work the moment that company changes. Attacking a practice lets a reader convict themselves in private, which is the only kind of persuasion that survives the click. Cost: it is less satisfying, and less shareable. In practice, no competitor is named in anything I publish, and no client is either.

03One idea per piece

A piece defending three ideas defends none of them. The second idea steals the evidence the first one needed, and the reader leaves holding an impression. Cost: more pieces, each of them shorter, and a slower apparent output. In practice, if I cannot state what a piece argues in one sentence before writing it, the piece does not get written.

04Evidence, or drop the claim

Any statement about the market carries a burden. A figure needs a source that still exists, published by the organisation that produced the number, not by a blog quoting a blog quoting a slide. Cost: some good sentences die because the number behind them cannot be traced. In practice, an unverifiable figure gets deleted, never softened with "studies show".

05Specific beats clever

Wordplay is the cheapest form of confidence and the first thing forgotten. A concrete detail outlives it, because a reader can picture a detail and cannot picture an abstraction. Cost: less immediately impressive in a room. In practice, I cut the pun and describe the thing that actually happened, even when the pun was the reason I wanted to write the piece.

06Write the sentence that loses the wrong client

Positioning that offends nobody attracts nobody, and work taken on false pretences costs more than the work refused. The sentence that makes the wrong prospect close the tab is doing paid labour. Cost: a smaller top of funnel and some uncomfortable silences. In practice, the first conversation includes the version of the answer that ends it, when that is the honest answer.

07Publish the limits

Every method has conditions under which it fails, and stating them is what separates a practitioner from a pitch. A reader who is told where something breaks trusts the rest of it more, not less. Cost: it removes the option of promising a method works everywhere. In practice, every piece of method I publish carries the case where it is the wrong tool.

08Findable is part of the work

An argument nobody encounters is a diary entry. Being retrievable by a search engine, and quotable by an answer engine, is a craft decision, and it changes how a piece is built: clear questions, direct answers, and structure a machine can read without guessing. Cost: constraints on form. In practice, the question a buyer would type is answered in the first paragraph under the heading, not in the conclusion.

09Nothing goes out that I would not defend in a room

Publishing at volume is easy and is the reason most category writing is interchangeable. The test is whether I would take the argument into a meeting with somebody who knows the subject better than I do. Cost: far less output than a content calendar would show. In practice, anything I would soften in person gets rewritten or killed before it is published.

10If it fits in a line, it does not get a deck

Length is often a way of hiding that the thinking is not finished. A recommendation that needs forty slides usually contains three slides of decision and thirty seven of insurance. Cost: it looks like less work, and some people are buying the appearance of work. In practice, the recommendation goes in the first line and the reasoning follows it, in the order a sceptic would ask.

Where this stops working

Curiosity is the wrong instrument in at least three situations, and pretending otherwise would break the fourth and seventh principles in the same breath.

• When the category is genuinely unknown. A buyer with no frame of reference has no gap to feel, because a gap needs two edges. Explanation comes first, and intrigue comes after there is something to be intrigued about.
• When the purchase is urgent and functional. Somebody replacing a failed system this week wants specifications and availability, and treating them to a question is an obstacle.
• When the product cannot survive the attention. Curiosity accelerates discovery in both directions. It is the fastest way to get a weak product looked at closely by the people who will notice.

There is also a version of this that fails on its own terms. A gap opened and never closed is a tease, and a tease repeated becomes a reason to stop reading. The obligation created by the first sentence is discharged before the last one, or the method has been used as decoration.

The short version

Earn the look, then be worth it. Everything else is implementation.

Where this becomes work

The four services on what I do are these principles with a timeline and a proof point attached to each one.

Keep reading: What is curiosity marketing? and How to sound different when every competitor says the same thing.