Brand Curiosity
Theory

The questions change as people get to know you.

When people first meet you, they often ask relatively simple questions. Who are you? What do you do? What is this product? As you answer those questions, you'll find that over time, the questions become more complex, because the understanding they have of you also rises.

It goes from who are you and what do you do to, hey, last time we spoke, you were going to launch a new campaign for your business. How is that going? They're bringing something from your story back into the conversation. That's one of the things I look for when I'm trying to understand someone's interest.

Answer the question and set the stage for the next one.

Someone asks, who are you? I could simply say, I'm Chirag. I've answered the question, but now I've put the responsibility back onto you to come up with the next one. I could also go on for twenty minutes about everything I do. Neither gives you an easy way into the conversation.

Instead, I might say, I'm Chirag, I'm the speaker here. Or, I'm Chirag, I work in tech. I've answered the question while setting the stage for a more complex one. What topic are you speaking about? Where in tech do you work? I've made the next step easy.

The same thing happens on your website. Someone should be able to get the answer they came for and see a natural place to go next. Your job is to respect their time and cognitive effort by making it simple to move to the next phase.

At every stage, ask what they need to know.

What are the questions they have at this stage?

When I first come across your video, my questions might be, who are you? What do you do? Do you create more content like this? Before I hit follow, I'm asking whether I want more of this in my feed.

On a product page, I may want to know how the product works, what the reviews say, what it's made from and how much it costs. At checkout, the questions may be about shipping costs and when it will arrive. After purchase, they may be, how do I track my package? How do I leave a review? At every stage, the questions are different.

If I'm sitting on a product page, and half the page is telling me who the company is instead of answering my questions about the product, I can feel disconnected. You're adding work for someone who's already stressed out and overwhelmed. Meet them where they are.

The homepage was answering questions they'd already answered.

An example I share in my talks comes from helping a brand with a large social following that wasn't translating into sales. We mapped the journey, from the content to the profile, the link in bio, the homepage, the product page and checkout. We kept trying to improve the homepage.

Eventually, we tried sending a portion of the social traffic directly to the product page. The content had already talked about the founders, their backgrounds and the problem they wanted to solve. By the time those people clicked, their questions were, how much will it cost me? How fast can I get it?

For that audience, we could take them directly to what they wanted to see. The lesson I took from the work is to map the questions across the whole journey, including the content someone saw before they reached your website.

Build the journey around the questions.

You have the echoes. You have the stories. Now you're choosing where they belong. That's how the three steps of the Brand Clarity Framework work together.