How Missing Trash Bins Reminded Me About Curiosity Driven Sales

With all the tricks and techniques to grab someone’s attention, there remains one concept at the core of many successful campaigns, even more so than big promises. Curiosity. Curiosity leads to anticipation. Anticipation triggers that pins and needles feeling where you absolutely must find out what comes next.

For example, the headline: How to lose belly fat without diet, exercise or surgery

There’s a promise in there of how to lose weight. That you can find anywhere. The key that makes it work is: without diet, exercise or surgery

The curiosity of finding out how to lose the fat without the usual means makes it irresistible.

Standard stuff, maybe. But I bring this up because I am curious about something. On vacation here in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic there seems to be a strange custom. In my world travels I’ve never encountered anything like it before.

What Do You Do With Trash

There are no trash cans in the hotel rooms. You might expect that to be the norm for a twenty dollar a night dive, not a four star rated resort. We’re traveling with several other families and they all shared the same experience. Nobody can come up with a plausible explanation.

Why on earth would you not put a trash bin in a hotel room? Nobody at the hotel seems to know why either.

The difference between the curiosity I’m feeling about the hotel rooms and the curiosity of the weight loss headline shows the right way and wrong way to use curiosity.

When you use curiosity to draw in an audience keep in mind that it needs to be relevant and it should, if possible, hint at some deeper benefit. Curiosity for the sake of curiosity won’t do. In our weight loss example, I listed three common ways to lose weight and hinted that my secret uses something different. The reader thinks “hmm. I’ve tried diet, exercise and even surgery. Maybe this will work. I must know the secret”

If my resort put out a headline “No more trash bins in your hotel room” it creates curiosity but not in a good way. It lacks relevance to providing an enjoyable visit and no hidden benefit exists.

Let’s apply this to our weight loss example. If I wrote a headline “How to keep off weight like track and field Olympians”, that might create some curiosity but it lacks relevance. Most of us would look at that and think the secrets of track stars don’t apply to me.

Curiosity works. Just use it wisely. As far as the no trash bins in the hotel rooms? I check out of here in three days. Maybe I’ll find out.