The quest to make things simple has become, paradoxically, a rather complicated business.
For more than a decade, Siegel+Gale, the global branding agency that is part of the Omnicom Group, has published what it calls the World's Simplest Brands report, an annual exercise in quantifying something that ought to be self-evident but apparently is not. This year, the agency turned its attention to business-to-business brands, examining how companies that sell to other companies are faring in the eternal struggle against corporate murk.
The findings, which Siegel+Gale presented at a recent panel discussion it sponsored at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, will surprise no one who has ever tried to explain what a company actually does: the clearer brands are doing better than the unclear ones.
"The world rewards clarity," said Jason Cieslak, the global president of Siegel+Gale, delivering the sort of observation that sounds obvious until you consider how many companies have failed to absorb it.
Mr. Cieslak noted that complexity tends to accumulate at large corporations the way sediment gathers in a riverbed — through acquisitions, product extensions, and what might charitably be called organic innovation. "Suddenly, they find themselves showing up clumsy and complex in ways that are detrimental to the business," he said.
The report found that simpler business-to-business brands are 51 percent more likely to be trusted to do the right thing, a statistic that Amy Bonitatibus, the chief corporate affairs and communications officer at PayPal, invoked while discussing her company's efforts to position itself as a trustworthy steward of other people's money. (What, you were expecting them to position themselves as an untrustworthy steward?)
Paula Berg, the vice president of brand and corporate marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, offered perhaps the panel's most memorable formulation, comparing complex technology brands to "a technology mullet" — messy in the back, elegant in the front.
Ms. Berg also issued a warning about the current proliferation of artificial intelligence companies, which have achieved the remarkable feat of making one of the most transformative technologies in recent memory sound almost entirely interchangeable. "When you're saying the same things as your competitors, it actually accrues to the category leader," she said.
Which is to say: simplicity is valuable, but only if it is your simplicity and not everyone else's.
Original story published in Fast Company: "Knowing the value of simplicity"