Marketers Keep Preaching Simplicity, But It Isn’t Happening

In today’s overcrowded world, consumers are bombarded with information, marketing messages, and options, leaving everyone craving the simplicity that only brands like Apple seem to have mastered. Marketers love simplicity in theory, but in practice, it’s much harder to achieve.

What Simplicity Really Means

It’s easy to love the idea of simplicity as an end result, but the path to simplicity can be challenging and demanding. At the heart of simplification is choice: you have to choose what’s most important (prioritization), and what to include and exclude. This is difficult for marketers on a case-by-case basis. Who has the power to make these important decisions? How can we make sure these decisions are aligned across the organization?

The Role of Brand Strategy

Without a brand strategy acting as your compass, it’s easy to get lost. You need a well-defined brand strategy that is easily understood and can be articulated by everyone in the company. A brand strategy is essential to everyday decisions that align with overall business goals. With a brand strategy in place, you don’t have to make major strategic decisions at every touch point. You just need to apply the brand strategy to your marketing channels.

If your marketing team is struggling to make the necessary choices required to create simplified experiences, then you may need a brand check-up. A brand strategy includes defining your vision and mission, core values, unique value proposition, positioning, brand promise, voice, key messaging, and target audience(s). A well-defined brand strategy can help you make decisions at the highest level all the way down to the nitty gritty details.

Is your brand failing to simplify?

Here are common signs a company is struggling to simplify because they don’t have the support of a well-defined brand strategy:

1. Creating product line or brand extensions just for the sake of selling more. Just because you have a successful product does not mean you should milk it for all its worth by creating every possible version of it for every type of consumer. A product that is successful for one consumer segment will not necessarily translate to another segment. Famous failed extensions include: Dr. Pepper marinade, AriZona Nachos ’n’ Cheese Dip, Samsonite Outwear, and the Virgin Water Purifier.
2. Adding product features without clear rationale grounded in user-centricity. So what if you can add a feature. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Guessing what your consumer wants instead of doing your research and identifying a specific target audience and their needs is often a waste resources. Build it and they will come no longer applies when you’re competing with companies who are starting with ethnographic research and using human-centered design to create products with real meaning and purpose in people’s lives.
3. An overcrowded homepage with too many calls to action (CTAs).Your homepage is not a one-size-fits-all station for the entire online population. Stop trying to please everyone, even if it’s within your customer base. You need to understand the purpose of the homepage within today’s digital context and create a highly targeted experience.
4. Creating bloated website navigation. Everything is equally important! Make sure people can get everywhere in one click! If you really know your consumers, you won’t need to overwhelm them with every single option in your product offering. Do the work of understanding the buyer journey and what people need at each stage. Learn more about the sins of website navigation with this KISSmetrics article.
5. A blog with too many categories. This is a sure sign you don’t have a documented content strategy. Creating content for every category under the sun doesn’t mean you’re more likely to win people over, it just means you’re creating more junk for people to wade through before they get to the good stuff. Never create content just to create content. Don’t even create content just because it’s related to your product or service. You should always have a plan that connects content to your audience(s) and their wants, needs, fears, uncertainties, etc. It should also be created within the competitive context – there’s no use in replicating what’s already out there. For example, United Airlines’ blog has almost 100 different tags, and many of them don’t provide the consumer value. How does the tag “campaign” say anything about what content the consumer can expect? What’s the difference between digital friendly and technology?
6. Overuse of branded terminology. Sometimes it’s helpful to create branded terms that signify something unique your brand offers that is not offered by anyone else and doesn’t have existing language to describe it. But when you start making up a bunch of branded language just to make it seem like your products/services are unique, you’re just creating an unnecessary burden on consumers. In an overcrowded world, this creates more noise and increases friction to purchase. It’s also a really good way to alienate non-customers and turn them away.

All of these actions serve to further complicate your marketing and the overall brand experience. Simplicity is much more holistic than just an uncluttered visual design or pithy copy. It’s about everything you do. At the heart of simplicity is laser focus and a unified agreement about overall strategy. In order to truly simplify marketing, companies must invest in their brands – beyond the vanity descriptions – to create an actionable platform from which they can make decisions.