Why simplicity is key to marketing success

As our world and technology have become increasingly complex, people gravitate toward simple, easily recognizable messages and calls-for-action.

Let's agree: The time of complex visual messaging in marketing and advertising is over. Collages are dead.

A simple image that conveys a single core idea are favoured by marketers and brand managers because they work. In essence, today anything that is not necessary to get to “yes” merely gets in the way. 

It is the difference between the completely uncluttered Google search website with its legendary a single function, and Yahoo search where myriad content has come to obscure its (former) main function. 

The challenge is that arriving at simplicity is hard work. It requires a focused purpose and a great deal of clarity. It requires knowing who exactly your message needs to speak to and convince to pay attention and a deep understanding of what breakthrough communications are about, what they must over come. 

Our brains are designed to edit out information, to ignore clutter, to disregard anything that doesn't look immediately pertinent. 

Great marketing gets past those hardwired gatekeepers. And great marketing has to be singular, direct and address an important target market motivation. 

Hallmarks of effective communications

1. Purpose
2. Specific target audience
3. Relevance to audience
4. Clarity
5. Consistency
6. Suitable medium
7. Repetition
8. Multi-channel
9. Conversation
10. Evaluate and Learn

Components of effective messaging

• Message (what you want to say)
• Redundancy (used to emphasize the message – can be image and text working together)
• Decoration (Embellishing to increase attractiveness and get attention)

Noise is all the things that interfere with the intended message.  In the arts, as in other sectors, an important issue remains learning to reduce the noise in our marketing and to focus on the single most important audience motivation to connect an experience with that audience. Because, ineffective marketing - the kind that has no clear message which means there is no redundancy or useful embellishment, and therefore there is no noise reduction and results simply in information overload which humans are designed to simply dismiss -leads to "No." 

Embracing the challenge of simplicity means honing a more rigorous process to arrive at effective communications that have the power to connect with your intended audience.