The curiosity versus direct debate is the wrong argument.

For the last couple of years our profession has been split into two camps.

One says curiosity marketing is the way. Don’t lead with the product. Create intrigue. Get them to ask.

The other says that whole approach is why people are annoyed with us. Be direct. Say what you sell. Stop being coy.

Both camps think they’re arguing about strategy. They’re arguing about mechanics.

The actual variable is not whether you’re curious or direct. It’s whether you gave anyone a reason to care before you asked them for anything.

And before I go further, let me say the thing that should be obvious and usually isn’t. If something is working for you, keep doing it. I’m not here to tell someone with a system that’s producing results that they’re doing it wrong. This isn’t a rulebook. It’s an argument about what actually drives the outcome, because I think a lot of people are optimizing the wrong variable and can’t figure out why their numbers won’t move.

The frustration people feel with curiosity marketing is real, and it’s earned.

Somewhere along the way, curiosity got interpreted as concealment. Hide the product. Hide the company. Post a photo of yourself looking happy next to something unlabeled. Reply to every comment with “sent you a DM.” Answer direct questions with more questions.

That isn’t curiosity. That’s evasion with a marketing name on it.

People noticed. Then they got annoyed. Then a lot of them decided the entire concept was the problem and swung hard the other way.

Here’s where I’d push back on the overcorrection.

Being direct does not automatically produce results. It just changes what you’re bad at. If you post “I sell this product, buy it from me” every day to an audience that has no reason to trust you, you have not solved anything. You’ve traded being annoying and vague for being annoying and obvious.

The people who moved to direct and saw results usually weren’t successful because they got direct. They were successful because they had already built enough credibility that being direct finally made sense. The directness got the credit. The credibility did the work.

This is where I’d want anyone in the pure-direct camp to look at the data.

Researchers analyzed 29,814 posts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from ten large institutions. On Facebook, promotional content made up 18% of everything published but generated only 3% of total engagement. Learning-focused content, meanwhile, produced 14% of engagement from just 10% of activity. Icertias

Read that ratio again. Promotional posts were published six times more often than they earned engagement.

That’s not an audience preference. That’s a distribution problem. Algorithms increasingly favor informative content because it holds attention longer. Longer engagement signals value, value increases distribution, and distribution increases visibility. Promotional content moves in the opposite direction on every one of those.

So the sell-sell-sell approach has a structural ceiling built into the platform itself. You can be as direct as you want. The algorithm still decides how many people see it, and it is not on your side.

There’s a cost to pure-direct that shows up later and hurts more.

You can build a customer base on direct offers. You will have a much harder time building people who advocate for you without being asked.

Advocates are created by experience, not by transactions. Somebody who bought a product from a post is a customer. Somebody who learned something from you for six months before they ever bought is something else entirely. They send you people. They defend you when someone talks trash. They stay when a competitor undercuts your price.

Direct offers convert the people who were already ready. Value creates the people who weren’t ready yet and became ready because of you.

Both matter. One of them compounds.

Picture two restaurants on the same block.

The first one has no sign, no menu in the window, and blacked-out glass. When you ask what they serve, the host says “come inside and find out.” Some people are intrigued. Most walk to the next block.

The second one has a guy on the sidewalk shouting the menu at everyone who walks past. He does it every day. Loudly. You know exactly what they serve. You still don’t go in.

Then there’s the third restaurant. No mystery, no shouting. There’s a line out the door because for two years the food has been good and people have been telling their friends.

The first two are having an argument about signage. The third one is running a restaurant.

That’s the whole thing.

“Provide value” is the most worn-out phrase in this profession. It got worn out because it’s a principle, and principles get repeated. That doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it unexamined.

The problem is that people say “provide value” and then post a quote graphic with a sunset on it and call it done.

So let me break down what value actually means in practice, because I don’t think this gets defined often enough.

Testimonials, told properly.

Not the before-and-after with a rocket emoji. The real version, which includes what the person struggled with, how long it took, what almost made them quit, and what specifically changed.

And here’s the part people miss. You need a range of people. Different ages, different starting points, different personalities, different lives. Because a 45-year-old mother of three does not see herself in a 24-year-old athlete’s result, no matter how impressive it is. She’s looking for someone like her. If you only ever share one type of story, you’re only ever reaching one type of person.

Peer reviews now outrank brand messaging as the most trusted authenticity signal, and 79% of consumers read three or more reviews before they buy. Three or more. One glowing testimonial is not proof. A body of them, from different kinds of people, starts to be.

What didn’t work.

This is the one almost everyone skips, and it’s the highest-trust content you can make.

Tell people what you tried that failed. The approach that wasted six months. The thing you believed that turned out to be wrong. The product you were sure about that didn’t do what you expected.

Two things happen. You become believable, because a person who only reports wins is either lying or not paying attention. And you save your audience real time, which is an actual gift.

Overproduction backfires now. Imperfection has become a trust signal. The polished-only account reads as a sales asset. The account that admits things is read as a person.

The process, not the highlight.

Show what you’re actually doing. Not the outcome. The work.

The morning you didn’t want to do it. The conversation that went badly. The system you’re testing this month. What your actual day looks like, including the unglamorous parts.

The reason this works is that most of your audience will never relate to your best day. They will absolutely relate to your Tuesday.

Adjacent value.

This is the piece I’d underline hardest, and it’s what separates people who build real audiences from people who build a feed full of product photos.

If you’re in health and wellness, your value is not confined to your product. It’s everything you’ve learned about health and wellness. Training. Sleep. Food prep when you have no time. How you handled an injury. What you do when you fall off for three weeks.

None of that mentions your product. All of it establishes that you know what you’re talking about in the space your product lives in.

Research from Conductor found that customers are 131% more likely to buy from a brand after consuming its educational content. Not after seeing an ad. After learning something. financialcontent

The adjacent value is what earns the right to eventually be direct. And when you are, it lands differently, because by then you’ve already proven you know the territory.

Being the product of the product.

Not a photo of the box. Evidence that you actually use the thing and it actually does something.

Over time, consistently, with specifics. What changed and when. What you noticed. What you didn’t notice that you expected to.

This one is simple and rare, mostly because it requires the product to actually be working for you.

Here’s a frame I’d offer to anyone who reads this and thinks I don’t have anything valuable to say yet.

You have two options and both are legitimate.

Be the expert. Go deep on one specific thing until you know it better than almost anyone in your audience. Not five things. One. You do not need credentials. You need depth and a track record you can point to.

Be the reporter. If you’re not the expert yet, go find the experts and report back. Read the study and explain it in plain language. Interview the person who’s ahead of you. Test the protocol for ninety days and publish what happened.

The reporter role is wide open and almost nobody claims it, because it doesn’t feel impressive. It’s enormously valuable. Your audience does not have time to read the research, listen to the podcasts, and test the methods. If you do that work and translate it honestly, you have provided something real regardless of your own résumé.

What doesn’t work is the third option, which is what most of the field is currently doing. Neither expert nor reporter. Just present. Posting to stay visible, sharing other people’s graphics, offering nothing that required any work to produce.

Presence is not value. It used to be enough, because attention was cheap and the feed was empty. That era is over.

Something has shifted in the last eighteen months and I think it explains most of what people are feeling.

Gartner named “reality skepticism” as one of three major consumer trends demanding marketers change strategy for 2026, alongside economic caution and a return to real-world experiences. Fifty-six percent of consumers are already spending as if we’re in a recession, including 58% of Gen Z and 63% of Millennials.

In beauty, 54% of industry executives now cite consumer skepticism as a major concern. In B2B, researchers surveying enterprise buyers described the change in one phrase: a shift from hype to proof.

From hype to proof.

That’s the market you’re posting into. People are more cautious with money than they were two years ago, they assume marketing claims are inflated until demonstrated otherwise, and they are actively looking for evidence rather than accepting it.

Attention used to be the scarce resource. Get seen, get sales. That’s why so much of this profession optimized for reach and volume and posting frequency.

Attention isn’t scarce anymore. It’s saturated and getting cheaper every month as AI floods every feed with more of it. What’s scarce now is credibility. Actual demonstrated proof that something works and that the person telling you about it is being straight with you.

And that’s genuinely hard for a normal person to sift through, which is the opportunity. If you become the account that consistently tells the truth, shows the real numbers, admits the failures, and reports honestly on what works, you become a filter people rely on.

Filters get followed. Filters get trusted. Filters sell things without having to sell hard.

I went back and forth on whether this deserves a label. Value-first marketing, proof marketing, something.

I don’t think it does, and inventing one would be part of the problem.

This profession has a habit of taking a fundamental and giving it a new name so it feels like a discovery. It isn’t. Serving people before you ask them for something is the oldest idea in commerce. Curiosity and direct are both just delivery mechanics sitting on top of it.

The reason we got here is that social media briefly made the fundamental optional. For about a decade, you could post a product photo to an empty feed and get sales, because attention was cheap and skepticism was low. An entire generation of builders learned marketing during that window and reasonably concluded that visibility was the skill.

Then the window closed. Feeds saturated. Skepticism rose. AI made content infinite. And the people who never built the underlying skill found themselves posting into silence, blaming the algorithm.

The algorithm is doing what it was always going to do. It’s rewarding the thing people actually want to consume.

Look at your last thirty posts. Count how many of them gave someone something they could use without buying anything from you.

If the number is under half, that’s your answer. It isn’t your hook, your posting time, your format, or whether you named the product.

Then pick your lane. Expert or reporter. Choose one and commit to it for ninety days.

Then pick one thing this week that you learned the hard way and share it, including the part where it didn’t work.

Do that consistently and the curiosity-versus-direct question stops being interesting, because you’ll be able to do either one and have it land. When you’ve spent six months genuinely helping people, you can say “this is what I sell, here’s the link” and it reads as helpful rather than as a pitch. You earned the right to be direct.

That’s the whole answer. It’s not a strategy. It’s a sequence.

Value first. Everything else is delivery.