Be brave: Resist the siren call of over-simplification

In Marketing Society’s year of bravery, I feel it’s time to make a stand, stick my head over the parapet and urge my fellow marketers to keep it complex - stupid.

Since the days of Rosser Reeves, the U.S.P. and Ries & Trout, and their over-simplified message for an over-communicated society, marketing has embraced simplicity as if it was the ultimate panacea.

Simplification can be very valuable

• It can and does make life easier.
• It makes things easy to understand and easy to communicate.
• It provides clarity.

However, when taken to the extreme, which it increasingly is in marketing, it is a false god.

Simplification has become over-simplification and the drive for singularity can be seen in many aspects of marketing; the core target group, the killer insight, the one-thing-we-want-people-to-take-from-the-communication, the one thing that differentiates you, the one sentence - even the one word - essence. This simplification has become too simplistic an answer. Organisations who fixate on it are in danger of creating blandness not brand-ness. 

Few people would question if Guinness is a great brand, but have they considered that it isn’t single-minded – it is communion, Irish-ness (including the craic), heritage, and maturity with a past that is tinged with strength and goodness. It has breadth and depth.

As Oscar Wilde said In ‘The importance of being Ernest’, "the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple". Not everything is simple, nor should it be. There is real value in variety. Brands need to be coherent but not blindly and blandly consistent.

Much of the thinking for this drive to over-simplification is the legacy of the thinking of yesterday when it was one product-one brand and advertising was the main marketing medium.

This is no longer true and indeed the assertions behind that thinking weren’t ever based on any scientific evidence, though that didn’t seem to hold it back.

The reality is that in the worlds of media, human behaviour and brands things have changed fundamentally since the heady days of the Madmen.

Nowadays most brands offer a portfolio of products and services. They are striving to engage more often with more groups of people all along the customer journey and where experience is now recognised to be more important than communication. Brands need to appeal to internal and multiple external audiences all at the same time. They need to cross continents, cultures and categories, meaning the singular, one size fits all propositions that may have worked well in a simpler world is now an idea that is simply out of date.

Marketers would do well to adopt a concept of multiplicity, which exists in a number of other disciplines. In philosophy, Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) used the term to describe thought phenomena that are in constant flux, and said it was “like a sand dune, a multiplicity is in constant flux, though it attains some consistency for a short or long duration.”

In which case, brand multiplicity could be defined as a term used to express the true complexity and constantly evolving multifaceted nature of brands and their relationships with multiple groups of different stakeholders. It recognises that brands are in constant flux, though they attain a central coherent core.

So be brave, think different, embrace multiplicity and the richness it can bring to your brand.

Giles Lury, Director at the Value Engineers and author of “The Marketing Complex, How modern marketers need to manage multiplicity.