Suspense as Marketing: How Adobe and Blendtec Used Core Drive 7 to Build Empires
See how Adobe and Blendtec used Core Drive 7, suspense, and curiosity to turn simple marketing into memorable product demonstrations that pulled audiences in.
Most marketing campaigns try to show you something. The better ones make you want to find something out.
That difference matters because curiosity creates active attention. When people feel a real question in their minds, they lean in instead of tuning out.
This is the power of Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity. It shifts an audience from passive viewing to anticipatory engagement.
Adobe’s “Real or Fake?” campaign and Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series are strong examples of how that mechanism can turn simple product marketing into something far more compelling.
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- CD7 (Unpredictability) is the most marketing-friendly Core Drive because suspense is cheap to manufacture and expensive to ignore. A teaser costs almost nothing to produce and can generate weeks of attention. No other drive has that ratio. Marketing teams that learn to deploy CD7 elegantly get outsized reach on modest budgets.
- Adobe's CD7 play was narrative — telling users “something is coming” before revealing what. The suspense was the ad. By the time the product was revealed, the audience had already spent weeks speculating, which meant they were emotionally invested before they saw the feature. That pre-investment is the real mechanic.
- Blendtec's CD7 play was physical — “will it blend?” is a literal unpredictability engine. Every video asks the same question and withholds the answer for two minutes. That simple suspense loop built a brand out of what would have otherwise been a commodity blender category. The drive did the differentiation work the product alone could not do.
- Both campaigns share a hidden ingredient: they were cheap enough to repeat forever. One Adobe teaser. One Blendtec blend. The mechanics were built for infinite reuse. Teams that build CD7 campaigns around a single expensive event rarely get the second hit. Repeatability is the underrated half of any CD7 strategy.
- The deepest insight: CD7 marketing works only when you actually deliver a surprise at the end. A tease without a payoff teaches the audience to ignore your next tease. Adobe's reveals were always big enough to reward the wait. Blendtec's blends always produced something absurd. Campaigns that under-deliver on the payoff burn CD7 for the whole brand.
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About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003, years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect and Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 billion users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ academic publications. Explore his books here.
Why Curiosity Outperforms Explanation
When a campaign explains everything up front, the audience has no reason to stay engaged. They may understand the message, but they do not feel drawn into it.
Curiosity changes that. A good question creates an open loop in the mind. People want resolution, and that desire makes them pay closer attention.
That is why suspense can outperform explanation. It turns marketing from a presentation into an experience of discovery.
Adobe’s Real or Fake Campaign
Adobe wanted students to understand how powerful its creative tools were. Instead of leading with product claims or feature demonstrations, it used a challenge format.
Participants were shown unusual images and asked whether each one was real or digitally manipulated. This immediately activated curiosity because the audience did not know the answer and wanted to test their judgment.
The campaign also drew on Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. Viewers were not only consuming content, they were analyzing, guessing, and learning through feedback.
Most importantly, the campaign demonstrated Adobe’s value through the audience’s own uncertainty. If users could not tell what had been edited, Adobe’s product strength became obvious without needing a heavy sales pitch.
Blendtec’s Will It Blend Series
Blendtec used a different format but the same underlying principle. The question “Will it blend?” turned every video into a small suspense engine.
Instead of saying the blender was powerful, the campaign made viewers watch an experiment whose outcome felt uncertain enough to be worth seeing.
That made the product demonstration memorable. If the blender could destroy surprising objects on camera, viewers could easily infer what that meant for ordinary kitchen use.
The campaign succeeded not just because it was absurd, but because the absurdity carried a real product implication. Curiosity attracted attention, and the reveal made the performance believable.
The Shared Core Drive 7 Pattern
Adobe and Blendtec look different on the surface, but they share the same behavioral structure.
- Both start with a real question instead of a static claim.
- Both create uncertainty that viewers want resolved.
- Both turn the audience into participants rather than passive observers.
- Both let the product prove itself through the discovery process.
That is what strong Core Drive 7 marketing looks like. The suspense is not decorative. It is the mechanism that pulls attention toward the product truth.
The White Hat versus Black Hat distinction helps explain why these campaigns stay memorable instead of manipulative. Curiosity creates tension, which is partly a Black Hat force, but the payoff teaches, delights, or proves something useful. When the reveal rewards the wait, the campaign earns trust instead of just harvesting attention.
How to Apply Core Drive 7 in Marketing
If you want to apply this principle well, start by identifying a question your product can answer through experience rather than through explanation.
- What can your product do that people would actually want to see resolved?
- What uncertainty can your audience explore rather than just being told about?
- How can the discovery process itself become the proof?
The key is authenticity. If the question feels staged or the answer feels obvious, the suspense collapses. Strong Core Drive 7 campaigns work because the uncertainty feels real enough for people to care.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Core Drive 7 in Octalysis?
Core Drive 7 is Unpredictability and Curiosity. It motivates people by creating suspense, mystery, surprise, or an unresolved question they want answered.
Why did Adobe’s campaign work so well?
Because it let people experience Adobe’s product power through their own uncertainty instead of simply telling them the software was strong.
Why was Will It Blend effective beyond entertainment?
Because the spectacle still communicated a clear product truth. The question attracted attention, and the result reinforced the blender’s power in a memorable way.
What makes curiosity-based marketing fail?
It fails when the question feels fake, the answer is too obvious, or the reveal does not meaningfully connect back to the product.
What is the practical takeaway for marketers?
Do not just explain benefits. Create a real question your audience wants resolved, then let the product answer it through experience.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework: Complete Gamification Framework
- How the 8 Core Drives Interact
- Level II and III Octalysis: The Advanced Framework
- The Hidden 9th Core Drive: Sensation
- Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity