I was walking outside of my office one morning not long ago when an older gentleman on a bicycle passed me on the street. As he drove past, I heard him whistling a tune. I could not help but listen. It was catchy and it was familiar to me, although I could not place it. I listened as he kept peddling on. I found myself straining to hear him as he rounded the corner. What was the name of that song? I knew I had heard it before. It finally dawned on me: it was the Marine Corps Hymn. You know, "From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli…” Now I was really curious. Why would an old fellow be riding around downtown on a weekday morning whistling the USMC Hymn?

I went on my way, but I could not stop thinking about the guy. I had all kinds of questions for him. I wanted to find out who he was. When everyone else was on their way to work, why was he riding a bike around town? Was he a former Marine? Is that why he was whistling the Marine Hymn? Did he just watch an old John Wayne movie where the song was part of the score? In a brief encounter on the street, the guy had me thinking about him for the next several days. I was totally intrigued by him.

Let me remind you that there is a very powerful marketing tool that you should incorporate into your advertising. It is the element of intrigue. When you build your advertising campaign with intrigue in mind, you are appealing to a natural curiosity that is a part of every human being.

Now you might be thinking that there is nothing necessarily intriguing about your products or services. You might be tempted to push all of this aside as the sort of thing that a soft drink company such as Coca Cola could pull off, or a corporation with a hip new gadget, like Apple’s i-phone, but not you. I would disagree with you, and there are plenty of examples of less than exciting, every day products that have been hyped with simple intrigue.

A few years ago, someone purchased billboard space and simply put one word on it. "Do.” As traffic passed by the sign, everyone had the same question, "Do what?” After the sign had been up for two weeks, another word was added. "Do you.” Now people were really buzzing about this. All of a sudden, people would bring this up with friends and co-workers. "Did you see the sign? They added another word to the sign.” A couple more weeks went by until the next word came up. "Do you have.” People began to anticipate the next word. I heard morning drive-time DJs on the radio take calls from people who would guess at the next word in the phrase. Two more weeks went by until the next word appeared. "Do you have your.” For the better part of two months, a simple sign had peaked the interest of an entire community. Finally, the phrase was finished a couple of weeks later. "Do you have your taxes filed? Express Tax Services open now until April 15.” This was a clever gimmick to build intrigue around a very mundane, but necessary, service: tax filing. Now there is little that is more boring to advertise than tax services. Yet, this billboard garnered more looks than any other over those eight weeks, all built upon intrigue.

This is an example of what Gestalt Psychologists called the Theory of Closure. It seems that in humans, there is a very basic need to see things through to completeness. We go through all sorts of contortions to find the missing parts. The worst thing in the world is to work on a puzzle only to find that the last piece is missing. Tests have been done on people who were shown pictures of broken circles (i.e. two ends of the circle did not meet to complete the circumference.) These people were asked to look quickly at the images. All of the people tested said the circles were unbroken. Their brains had lied to them. They had simply imagined that the loose ends of the circles met. Something in our brain triggers us to want completeness. This is where intrigue can be used to drive people to find out more about your product.

Here are a few simple rules when building intrigue into your advertising campaigns.

1. Don’t tell the whole story in an ad. In fact, ads, in whatever form, should be quite simple. Try to communicate one concept that leads to questions about the product, then leave the details to your sales staff.

2. Use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to create intrigue for you. With a limitation on the number of characters, Twitter is a perfect place to post an intriguing statement or question about your product and allow the customer to follow up. The idea is to get the customer to begin the hunt to satisfy their curiosity.

3. In building intrigue, you need to have a clear action point for the customer to find out answers to their questions. This could be a web site url, a click on a page, or a phone number to call. This gives them a next step. If you fail to do this, you will frustrate the customer.