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By Jeff Kear
In late 2004, I found myself giving a ride to John Zagula, a former Microsoft marketing exec who is one of the main people responsible for turning Microsoft Office into a household name. He needed a lift to his hotel from a marketing seminar he just presented here in Denver, and I jumped at the opportunity to pick his brain for a few captive minutes.
But before I could barrage him with a litany of potentially tiresome questions, he asked me my opinion of what was the most important issue he covered during his seminar. Feeling a bit unprepared, my reply started out in one direction and then headed in several others before I finally threw up my hands and said, "It seems that right now, for me and my clients, our biggest issue is keeping things simple and straightforward. Straightforward strategy, straightforward positioning, straightforward messaging."
Smiling, he shook his head and said, "At Microsoft, we learned early on that keeping things simple and straightforward makes the whole process move easier and leads to much more effective marketing. This stuff isn't brain surgery, and everything needs to be in digestible chunks so your customers can easily understand why you're different and better than your competitors."
He then went on to provide a variety of examples of companies that had devoted no small effort to develop a coherent strategy, clear position and streamlined message and how it has succeeded for them. The list included Microsoft (of course), Southwest Airlines, Sheraton Four Points, NetFlix, Lexus, etc. Then I went back to my office and started compiling my own list of companies that have lately gone back to (or stayed with) the simple and straightforward (like Oracle, McDonalds and Frontier Airlines) and noticed that they have all experienced an upswing in revenues after making the change. And that got me thinking...
As marketers, we are experiencing a quantum shift in our discipline and in our environment. The dot.bomb recession caused companies to focus more than ever on marketing ROI, but our strategies have been (and many still are) based on a 1990s business model. Competition is fiercer than ever and is eroding away our differentiating factors. Existing mediums are becoming less and less reliable to deliver a dedicated and interested audience, while at the same time we're quickly having to adapt to marketing across new mediums (i.e., the Internet).
With markets exploding and borders fading away, all this commotion and activity might make one think that marketing strategies, positions and messaging need to match the complexity of what's happening in the marketplace.
But let's stop right there...
The current conditions may make it a bit more involved for accumulating customer and competitive intelligence, and the fragmenting of audiences may make it a bit tougher to locate where your target audience is listening/watching/browsing. However, once you have done this homework and parsed your research down to a few basic precepts, a streamlined, straightforward approach is exactly what can set you apart in this congested marketplace.
Case in point ... A few years ago, Oracle, one of the world's largest database and enterprise software companies, had 150 different application products and an almost equal number of marketing messages. The result of this was much customer confusion and, ultimately, sluggish sales.
Then, in 2002, they decided to make simplicity the foundation of all their product development and marketing efforts. They talked with customers and discovered that their biggest concern wasn't the cost of the product itself but the cost of installing and implementing it, so they worked seamless integration into their offerings and contained these costs. They reduced the number of products from 150 to 1. And they streamlined their marketing message to express two ideas: 1) reliability and 2) security.
Now their advertising is almost downright austere in its simplicity, with just a few words (and sometimes only one word) expressing the main message of each print ad. In addition, their marketing materials (such as their Web site) talk to specific customer challenges and offer why Oracle is the answer to these challenges in a modicum of words.
And it's working, as Oracle has experienced steady revenue growth from 2002 to 2004.
The people at Oracle were definitely feeling the same pressures that most marketers now feel, and before their efforts to simplify they had been unable to resist the temptation to try to be everything to everybody (see Jack Trout's Differentiate or Die on the hazards of doing this). But instead of forcing 80 pounds of fertilizer into a 40 pound bag every time they put together a marketing strategy, position or message, Oracle went back to the drawing board, thoroughly researched their customers and competition, discovered the gaps in the marketplace and put together a marketing plan and message that spoke to their customers directly and succinctly.
John Zagula himself has a formula for simple messaging that I find very enticing. He calls it "Awesome, Awesome, Not Screwed Up", in which you offer your customers with one appealing aspect of your product/service, follow it up with another appealing aspect and then ease their fears and doubts by showing that your offering isn't "screwed up" like competitors' offerings. The idea here is to excite your customers, build on that excitement and then remove any barriers to them buying your product/service. Simple, straightforward and memorable.
And although there may be certain occasions when a prosaic approach might be more fitting, many companies are proving that brevity, conciseness and simplicity can be the shortest route to gaining new customers.About the Author
Jeff Kear is a principal at Kear|Stevens, an integrated marketing communications firm in Denver, CO. During his career in marketing and advertising, Jeff has created revenue-generating marketing communications for nationally recognized brands such as Budget, MetLife, Moosehead Beer, Qwest and Toyota. Before his work at Kear|Stevens, Jeff served as a senior-level creative at a few well-respected Denver ad agencies as well as a marketing and communications specialist for a Fortune 500 company.
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