Marketing magic

There was a lovely article in the March 17th New Yorker by Adam Gopnik called "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life". (It's not online but there's an ancillary podcast here.) A number of bloggers have written that Gopnik's thoughts on how magic works apply to their own fields, especially the idea that their real product is a state of mind co-produced with the viewer; the result of an open-ended, semi-competitive engagement with the willing, active minds of an audience:

What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of the effect but the magician's ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious...magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world.

[W]hatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information...Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Which is what an interesting marketing idea does. Brands like Nike and Apple don't have simple, static value statements or brand identities that require "mastering" our natural indifference through repetition and spectacle. Instead, they represent a tantalizing, permanent maze of possibilities.