The Science of Fascination
There are two ways to win someone’s attention:
Be brief. Or be captivating.
Brevity cuts through noise. It tunes out what’s unnecessary and confusing.
Fascination does the opposite—it tunes in. It draws people closer to what feels vivid, interesting, and personally relevant.
To connect with an audience today, you need both.
Brevity Matters
B2B communication has a bad habit of being long-winded: bloated sales decks, 40-page PDFs, jargon-packed websites, brilliant solutions buried under a pile of bullet points.
Yes, it takes time to explain complex ideas. But if you can’t do that quickly, people disengage.
Fascination Matters More
Most B2B brands have figured out how to explain what they do more clearly. Fewer are asking how to make someone care.
You can be clear as day—and still boring as hell.
You’ve heard of “TL;DR” (too long, didn’t read). But in most business settings, the real killer is “TB;DC”—too boring, don’t care.
Brevity gets the message across. But fascination gives the message weight. It creates a moment that actually lands.
This is especially true in high-stakes B2B. Where the buyer’s status quo feels safe. Where switching solutions introduces risk. Where understanding isn’t enough—you need conviction.
Fascination in Action: The Twilight Phone
Let me give you a quick example.
A few years back, we helped our client Somos tell the story of their pivot into the trust marketplace.
They were launching a solution set to combat telephone number fraud—essentially building a trust layer into the mobile network.
Their instinct was to showcase the tech. Dive under the hood. Highlight the algorithms.
We took a different approach.
Instead of walking the audience through a diagram, we walked them into a story.
We created an original film series called The Twilight Phone—a five-episode homage to the Twilight Zone, shot in film noir style.
There was a woman in distress. A mysterious figure who holds the answer. And a descent into digital deception.
The audience wasn’t just shown the product. They were invited into the problem. We dramatized the stakes.
We knew that during a day-long virtual customer summit, we’d lose people if we didn’t give them a reason to stay. These videos did exactly that.
Break after break, customers stayed glued to their screens. They had to see what happened next.
Yes, we were brief. Every episode was to the point. But what made it work was fascination.
We gave people a story they wanted to follow—and inside that story, we placed the strategic message.
Watch The Twilight Phone series here.
What the Science Says
There’s a reason this works—and it’s about how the brain processes information.
Clarity Comes First: The brain craves information that is easy to process—what psychologists call cognitive fluency. If something feels too complex or abstract, it triggers cognitive strain, and people check out.
Fascination Drives Decisions: The amygdala—the brain’s emotional command center—plays a major role in decision-making. Even in B2B. Especially in B2B.
Buyers aren’t just evaluating information. They’re weighing risk, uncertainty, legacy systems, and political capital. What they need isn’t another fact sheet. They need belief. Reassurance. A reason to move.
The amygdala decides whether to stick with the status quo (the buyer’s typical stance) or lean into adventure (the seller’s proposition).
Fascination activates that decision point. It makes your message feel significant—and worth the leap.
Story Is the Delivery System – Fascination is often channeled through story—because story is what creates emotional immersion. It simulates real experience in the brain.
Story builds tension and resolution. And it puts information in context—where it can actually influence behavior.
As Harris III puts it, story is the “operating system of the human mind.” That’s not metaphor. That’s biology.
Brevity + Fascination = Action
In a world flooded with noise, the winners are not the ones who say the most, or even the those who say the least.
The winners are the ones who say what matters—clearly, creatively, and in a way that people get up from their office chairs and act.
