The power of mystery.
J.J. Abrams, delivered a thought-provoking TED talk (as most TED talks are) on the subject of mystery. Considering his role in the creation of the TV show Lost, he’s obviously qualified to speak on the subject. As I listened I was struck by how profound some points were, worthy of book-length (or at least New Yorker-length) elaboration, but he had a lot of ground to cover, so I resorted to note taking as if I were back in college. Scrawled on my index card after listening was:
- 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.
4 comments
Nice post! And one I hope is valuable to AG clients everywhere, especially if they realize you’re saying there’s certainly a time and place for directness and absolute clarity in messaging, but too often we forget that stimulating and reawakening a sense of wonder and curiosity with a little mystery and ambiguity might bring [equal or potentially greater] results. Marketing people understandably like metrics and measuring things, but unfortunately this type of messaging is less immediately tangible.
The post reminds me of something I read by Jonathan Franzen in a New Yorker piece. When he and some friends were kids, they kept breaking into their school and…tweaking things. Leaving messages both written and in act to playfully bedevil their principal and upping the mystery. He wrote:
“My idea was to enchant the school for Mr Knight, to render the building momentarily strange and full of possibility, as a gift to him. And I was in the midst of discovering that writing was a way to do just this.”
Another example of this is designer Shepard Fairey’s “Obey” campaign. (Warning: If you’re an actual AG client reading this, don’t be put off by the fact that you personally might not have responded to this particular campaign because you’re outside the demographic. The point here is to examine something along the lines of mystery that worked spectacularly regardless of one’s personal taste.)
While at Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey did a stencil of Andre The Giant’s face and wrote “Obey”. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, he began stenciling it around the city, under overpasses, on benches. It appeared in the same cryptic way the stencil of the Army of the 12 Monkeys did around Philadelphia in the movie, 12 Monkeys. (Although Fairey was first.) He didn’t oversaturate the placement, but put it in enough places for it to be effective. The mystery of this stencil, with its unclarified command, Obey, drew a lot of attention from every and anyone passing by. They were puzzled. Intrigued. Vaguely unsettled. And certainly curious. It was a social phenomenon and catapulted Fairey into wide renown and considerable critical regard.
Here’s the manifesto he wrote regarding the campaign. Kinda makes you want to go study Martin Heidegger, doesn’t it?
“The Obey campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. The first aim of Phenomenology is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment. The Obey campaign attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with Obey propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail.
The medium is the message.”
Certainly no one is suggesting that approaches to messaging / marketing / advertising exactly like this are the way to announce a weekend furniture sale, but cutting through the repetitive clutter of most messaging campaigns and stimulating people a bit by sprinkling in a tiny bit of this could very well freshen up that “This Weekend! Only at X!!” line of messaging.
Oops: Here’s the link to Shepard Fairey’s Obey campaign:
http://obeygiant.com/
Okay, okay: I win most tedious of 2008. I get it. But I’d like to toss out one more thing about this post.
You mention Epiphone guitars in here. In my opinion, “epiphone” is a pretty ugly name. “Epi” (http://www.answers.com/topic/epi?cat=health) means On, Over, Above, Around. And “phone” means sound. So you have this clunky, ugly word that’s just a puzzlement as to what it actually means and why someone might have chosen it in the first place.
So that got me to thinking. Is it possible someone with a good ear (like someone who makes guitars) might have meant to name it something more suitable, more lovely?
There’s a naming convention we’re all familiar with, whereby the namer takes an existing word or words and tweaks them in an inventive way. “The Beatles” for instance. Kool Ade. Heck, there’s a million of ‘em. Look at the word Epiphone an try pronouncing it differently, with stresses on different parts of the word.
Epiphone, could, with the a little tweaking verbally, be pronounced “epiphany”.
Epiphany is such a nice word! It’s pretty. It sounds good. (Guitars are about sound.) It could be what happens when someone makes music with one of these guitars.
I don’t know, but I sure wonder if that might not be what they were shooting for. Only no one got the intent. (In the movie That Thing You Do, the band christens itself The Oneders which everyone pronounces OH Needers until their new manager finally says, “Wonders” just go with it.)
Anyone know one way or the other? Anyone care to look into it? >cough Fred<
Okay, that’s it for today, if not this year. bye
First of all, I sure don’t think there’s anything tedious about your comments, more the opposite. Obviously, I buy into the mystery premise, but it’s a fine line that must be walked with skill, with a lot of “What? Never mind” when you cross it. Or a lot of “Yipes” in the case of the infamous Cartoon Network stunt.
As for Heidegger, I don’t care what people say; he had an awesome hut, though personally I think it needs a porch.
Thanks for the though provoking comments. I need to remember to drink more coffee before reading them.
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