“Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?” George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Curiosity is one of the ancient drivers of human behavior. Per Yuval Noah Harari’s best selling book, Sapiens, it’s why we walked of Africa around 90,000 years ago.
Though incredibly powerful, curiosity is a rarely used tool in the world of marketing.
Curiosity drives human behavior
We decided to test the academic theory that curiosity drives behavior to see if it could work in the commercial world. A major travel brand with a tricky group of prospects wanted our help.
Their high value, but very hard to reach prospects, had ignored eight attempts by the brand to reach them. We set up an experiment where we marketed as normal to half the group and sent a gift to the other half.
Not just any gift
The gift that we sent to the test half of the group of prospects had a special twist – it was a beautifully made pouch (and with another gift inside), but it came locked with a combination lock attached to the zip.
Importantly there was a piece of marketing collateral outside with a telephone number (the sales line) that the prospects needed to call to get access to the gift inside this pouch.
Results
While we absolutely expected an increase in people contacting the sales line, we were surprised at is the conversion rate. The response increased by 2.4 times and the conversion by 2.25 times compared to the control group. This creative approach brought in thousands of dollars for our client.
Are you curious to know more? Contact MaCher for more ideas on how to use these behavioral insights to drive your business.