• Mystery is more important than knowledge
• Mystery is the catalyst for imagination
• No community is best served when the elite have control
• Democratization of media (I think from the context, this is more specifically the democratization of production, though dissemination on the internet could be the media component.)

For those in the creative disciplines, mystery is often the engine of the process itself. Musicians might conjure a figure or think of just one line of lyric, and then wonder where is this going? What instruments belong with it? What’s the mood? The message? And they’re driven to find out. That process has its analogies in art, literature, and film. If it leads to a revelation or any thought provoking conclusion, then the creative work is crafted in a way to bring the audience along on the journey. It’s storytelling and exploration, tapping into natural curiosity. (I wouldn’t be surprised if an addiction to mystery were a component of obsessive gambling.) Time was, and sometimes still is, mystery lured audiences through commercial breaks. You can’t push the remote when there’s a cliffhanger waiting to be resolved. But that is art and expression, not business. Business hates mystery.

Traditionally, marketing and advertising wants to implant certainty — quickly and often, preferably with an exclamation point and possibly bold italics. Though branding experts routinely refer to telling the “brand story,” in advertising and marketing the telling is often done without the powerful tool of mystery. But not always.User imagery has a some mystery to it. We see people associated with a brand and we wonder if they’re like us, or if we could be like them, even (or maybe especially) if they’re celebrities. Secondly, there are testimonials. If the mystery is whether a brand is worthwhile, credible testimonials are powerful clues. Game and Contest promotions, are fueled by curiosity. Are we lucky? If it is skill or talent-based contest, we wonder if we were good enough to win. Those are just a few obvious examples of how some level of mystery might be involved in traditional advertising, but compelling mysteries can fuel advertising on a case-specific basis.

Admittedly these examples aren’t mainstream, but since I’ve played the guitar for years, they’re at the top of my mind. There’s a brand called called Epiphone. For a time, years ago, their reputation was a little spotty. Buying an Epiphone was a hit-or-miss proposition due to what some players assumed was untamed quality control. But it is a brand on the rebound, and that’s a story players might find interesting. Who can resist a comeback story?Another story in this same category is Roland. They make a guitar modeling box called the VG-99, vastly expanding on the VG-8 box they introduced more than a decade ago. Here’s some video of this thing, but if you don’t have time to view it, I can tell you it demonstrates how one guitar can be innumerable guitars — even synth instruments — in any tuning, through most any amp, with any pickup configuration. If you watch that video and don’t find mystery (how?! What?! Who are the people that built this!?) you are a bigger geek than I.

Beyond that though, the story might easily tie into Abrams’s democratization observation. Technology like this (and other modeling products from a number of worthy manufacturers) have brought music production tools to the masses. The same thing is happening in video, and I’m sure many other fields. And that is an interesting story to a broader audience than fretboard freaks because one of the characters in democratization is the audience.For a marketer, identifying the mystery — what’s interesting, informative and engages curiosity, might make fresh advertising, the kind that can move past pronouncements and declarations in bold italics with exclamation points.