Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The mantra – ‘just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy’ – has been following me around lately, popping up in both personal and professional settings, reminding me that there’s an art to making complex things appear simple at a glance.     

Keeping it simple is the key in cooking a great dinner that suddenly just materializes, parenting with patience and invisible effect, creating a presentation that is the perfect balance of less is more, and not surprisingly, in great marketing. But getting to simplicity is sometimes quite hard. The pros just make it look easy, like accidentally walking through the busy kitchen of your favourite restaurant where everything seems like total chaos but turns out five-star results.   

Good marketing, by its very definition, should be simple. Every marketer knows that to be true – the quest to find the least best words to capture the idea, or as playwright August Wilson said, “The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is”. The best advertising campaigns, the best jingles, the best brands aren’t complex or asking you to do deep work to figure it out as the customer. You just get it, it resonates, it leaves an indelible impact. That’s where the magic lies, finding that “aha” moment that connects people across diverse walks of life and experience. After all, brands are just shortcuts – the fastest possible path to your dominant net impression.

Simple is the rare place all marketers aim for, but the process to get there can look a lot like that kitchen with its swirl of chaos, competing egos, breaking dishes, conflicting demands and unrealistic timelines.  To quote English essayist and social reformer, John Ruskin, “It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.” It requires a lot of stakeholders to buy-in, trust in the process, and willingness to align to the same principles. The first alignment is what success looks like and then (and this one is much more challenging) how we are going to get there.

There are a few principals that I think can help guide us in our quest for simplicity (and in turn, success) in our marketing and communications efforts:

1.     Put your customer at the centre of the table. Be endlessly curious and learn about them, understand their unique opportunities and challenges, listen to them. If you miss the mark, focus too inwardly as an organization or talk over top of them and dismiss their perspective, your time in the sun will be short. The hardest thing many of my clients have faced is the uncomfortable feeling of not letting ourselves truly become the target audience. This can be helped greatly by spending time and resources at the front of the process gathering those unique behavioural insights, writing a strong and concise brief and then working hard to stick to it amid the many distractions that are bound to creep in.

2.     Stick to your plan … and remain nimble enough to adapt. I always like to say 85% of a plan is baked, and the rest should be fluid enough to allow the team to be receptive and adaptive to shifting market conditions and things we can’t foresee or control, like say a global pandemic. But when we drift from the strategy that was grounded in customer insights, we start throwing darts randomly at the wall with one eye closed hoping for a bullseye. It doesn’t end well, it costs more, and momentum ceases due to a lack of ROI. Once you have nailed your simple but brilliant market position and strategy, play the long game in marketing – planning in single fiscal years, let alone quarters, is too short-sighted. We should be building long term plans and strategic frameworks and then using tactics to move us along with thorough check-in points and data analysis along the way. No brand stops on Dec 31st because your budget turned over.

3.     Let specialists do their thing. If you brought an agency to the table, it’s likely because you lacked that skillset inhouse, so try to think of them as an extension of your team, not a vendor or a line item. The best collaborations allow internal and agency team members to have real face time and joint ownership of projects, to get know one another’s areas of speciality, clearing the road for that shared vision of success we talked about. If you’ve done your due diligence in agency selection, their strategic thinking should get you fired up the way you want your customers to feel. Trust that they have done this many times before. Trust, permission and just enough rope will produce amazing results from the right partner. It will also greatly simplify the entire process of generating a simple but spot-on marketing strategy – and who knows, you might even have some fun along the way.

When the pieces click and teams trust and collaborate, push past discomfort to find alignment – and take the right calculated risks – great things can happen. Those seemingly effortless campaigns and taglines we share and talk about for years. You know, the ones that make it all look so simple.

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