Keep it Simple, or you’re Stupid

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Scott Gould

Have you ever made the mistake of making something too complex?

I remember when I was about 12 years old at school and we did a project called “Make a Million.” The idea was the children had to team up in pairs and then run a project that, during break times, would create revenue. Looking back, it was a great way for the school to instill some business and entrepreneurial skills into us as kids.

However, my project didn’t go down so well. Whereas some teams sold posters of clipart that they printed from their computer, or sold a set of 5 penalty kicks, or charm bracelets that they had made, my business partner and I decided to make a complex game which was a mix of snakes and ladders fused with monopoly. Suffice to say that when break time came, we normally sold one run on the game as it took the whole break to play it. But even then, people were reluctant to play because it was, well, just so complex! It was easy to buy a poster or kick a ball, but this was just too much.

Thus it was here that I learnt my first business lesson. Keep it quick, simple, and scaleable. I’d like to tell you that I learnt my lesson there and then, but my perfectionist mindset has struggled with this one for a long time as I have often defaulted back to building the perfect system as opposed to a profitable one, or even a useable one!

The simple one wins. Ask Dropbox.

I read a similar, more grown up version of the same story on Quora. Isaac Hall, co-founder of Syncplicity discusses why Dropbox is more popular than other tools that have similar and often better functionality. What he boiled it down to was simplicity. It just works. No tweaking necessary. (You can read his answer here, just click on “change log” to see his full response.) The most pertinent part of it was this:

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues — it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:Windows for dozens of users — doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn’t innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked him my burning question: “Why don’t you support multi-folder synchronization?” His answer was classic Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did limited beta testing with it, but they couldn’t get the UI right. It confused people and created too many questions. It was too hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.

I like this – Dropbox could have multiple folders, but they don’t, because people just don’t get it.

Making things simple is about making sure people get it. It’s realising that too many options paralyzes people (which one should I do?), that asking for settings scares people (what if I get it wrong?), that an unclear benefit deters people (why spend my time on this?)

Starting with simple

My friend Darren Smith is an expert in user design and experience and he tells me that when it comes to design there is a general rule to ensure that no matter how advanced a design gets its core remains simple, ensuring that any further levels of complexity advance the feature set without compromising the simplicity of the core.

This useful point helps us with something that Brian Driggs and I have been discussing on the subject of making meaning and also writing SMART email. When it comes to building a platform for people to live their lives on, it needs to be simple with optional further levels of complexity. As to how that looks, I’m not sure – but I’m up for discussing it.

5 ways to keep it simple

So what are the main lessons here? My main points, in contrast to my failures with my efforts to make a million at school, would be:

It can be explained in a sentence. My game couldn’t.
You can look at it and know what it is. You can look at a poster and know that you buy it. But when you look at a peice of card with directions scribbled on, it’s not that obvious.
You don’t need a manual. What is good about the iPhone is when you get it, it’s ready. No configuration. This isn’t the case with many phones that I’ve tested!
It’s quick. The great thing about Dropbox is that you install and it’s done, and you can use it right away. Again, no more configuration.
Any complexity is guided step by step. I loved playing this pinball game that I downloaded on my iPad a while ago that taught me how to use it step by step in a test run. This isn’t anything new, but it’s amazing how many platforms lack this and just expect you to figure it out through trial and eror.

So those are my 5 lessons. Now over to you:

Your Leading Thoughts

Thinking offline, how do we take the platforms that we are building and ensure they are simple, with further levels of complexity?
When does simple harm you?

Photo courtesy of visualpanic

Buyology Lesson 1: The Logo is Broken

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Scott Gould

Every wondered how you know an advert is for a product without seeing the logo or the product?

One of the hot new trends in marketing circles at the moment is neuromarketing. It’s the science of marketing in the sense that it measures people’s brain activity when they are looking and engaging with marketing messages, and thus seeks to deliver a quanitfiable answer to questions like “does engaging senses make a difference?”, “are logos effective?”, and “do anti smoking signs make people stop smoking?”

The leading book on this right now is Buyology (aff link), by Martin Lindstrom, which is a very well written journey through Lindstrom’s vibrant mind that debunks traditional marketing methods.

Of course those of us who are part of the social revolution know that traditional marketing is becoming more and more ineffective, but this book not only says in a way that your boss will listen, but goes one step prover and scientifically proves it (to a degree – the samples are small.)

Buyology

Over the next weeks I want to look at three or four of the main learnings that I drew from this book, along with adding the others things that I’ve been thinking about at the moment that extend his ideas further.

Each one is a lesson in how marketing, and indeed communication, has changed – or rather, has always stayed the same and only now have we realised how wrong our methods have been.

So without further ado, lesson one.

The Logo is Broken: how Association is the new Branding

Something I’ve been saying more and more to our sponsors for Like Minds is that I want to embed them into the narrative of our events. I’ve always known that banners on stage or logos on a website were not just cringy, they were ineffective, and instinctively I’ve always tried to make our sponsors the same companies that provide us with something that is used in the very fabric of the event. Starbucks provide our coffee, Ooyala provide our video platform, Optix provided a social media survey, etc.

According to Lindstrom, my approach is actually correct with the science of association. In fact he goes as far as to say that the association of a product, like the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle of the red of the Coca-Cola brand, neither with the logo in sight, is more powerful than seeing the logo. What Lindstrom did was wire people up to his MRI machine and scan their brain activity whilst showing them various images, videos and sounds. More brain activity meant more success, less meant failure. So this is what he found:

In measuring the effectiveness of Coca-Cola’s, Ford’s and Cingular’s sponsorshop of American Idol, Coca-Cola came out trumps and Ford didn’t get much benefit at all. Lindstrom says this is because Coca-Coal was part of the actual story of American Idol. The judges have Coca-Coal red glasses and seats that are modelled after the shape of their bottles. Contestants are interviewed in a Coca-Cola red room, and the song tracks can be downloaded courtesy of Coca-Cola.
Ford however are not involved with the contestants or judges at all – they only get an advert played at the beginning of the commercial break. What Lindstrom says is that the product or brand must be critical to the storyline. So he’d say that that one-off shot of the Sony Ericsson phone in Casino Royale wasn’t best placed because it wasn’t pivotal to the plot.
When measuring smoker’s reactions to cigarrettes, they reacted more strongly to the red of Malborro against a desert sunset (their branding) than they did to the logo. He did numerous other experiments that said the same thing. This is why he says we know when an advert is for a brand when we don’t even see the product – it’s all the associated feelings, colours, sights, sounds, storyline, etc. This is why Marborro do a good job with sponsoring Formula 1 – apparently when he showed people Forumla 1 images, the same part of the brain that craves cigarettes lights up because this association with the brand is so strong.

His conclusion is that our minds are so bombarded with logos all day that when we see a logo or know something is an advertisement, our guards go up automatically.

Smashable Brands and Strong Assocations

The marketer’s response, he says, must be to then strengthen the associations that we have with our brands. He calls brands that have very powerful associations smashable brands, as you could smash the brand into tiny pieces, pick up one of the those tiny pieces, and still know that it was the brand.

So in the case of Coca-Cola, if you smash a Coca-Cola bottle, you still know it’s Coca-Cola. Likewise you can tell a Mac OS X icon apart from a Windows one. Or take the image of the Ferrari at the top of this page – or is it? We think it’s a Ferrari becuase it’s bright red, but it might not be. That red on a car is so associated with Ferrari that we think it is. And also when I look at it I also think

The conclusion that I draw from all of this is that I need to far more aware of all the elements that either people already associate with my brands, and also what I want to associate. I think that whilst I’m keen on design and love branding, I actually haven’t been thinking enough about association.

I’d say most people take association as far as a logo, a font and a colour. We should be thinking about associating much, much more.

A critical part of this is knowing what to associate with. A association has the potential to harm our brand if it doesn’t have positive connotations and reinforce the values of our brand.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’ve chucked out a few thoughts here and certainly haven’t followed the thought line for long, because I think we need to discuss it here.

First of all, what are you comments on this? Have you seen other brands do association well? Have you experienced it yourself?
Second, what are some of the ways that we can be better at association? How do we ensure we pick correct associations?
Thirdly, given that many of us are knowledge workers with our own “brands”, how can we use association on a personal level?

Image courtesy of kaneda99

How to make Meaning

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

Yesterday we asked whether our brands are making meaning after examining the progression of brands from functional, to aspirational, and now to meaningful.

Today: how on earth do you make a brand meaningful?

Guy Kawasaki, when he discusses the Art of Innovation (exceptional videos – 10 minutes long), says that you must make meaning with your offering. He explains that products that go deeper than entertainment and touch at purpose at the ones who are making meaning – that their existence in the life of their customer is one that helps the customer define their world.

There are two core parts here for me that I would say we could distill “making meaning” down to:

Help people understand and define their life through your offering. Deliver offerings that empower people to make sense of where they are today, and where they were yesterday.
Move beyond entertainment to purpose. Provide people with direction, help them to discover their reason for being, where they want to be tomorrow. Make your brand something that people can derive identity from.

So we’ve got yesterday and today, and tomorrow. Understanding yesterday and today, and directing tomorrow. I believe that offerings and brands that do this are meaningful to me on the most fundamental level.

For example, my church, The River, is a meaningful brand to our community. We help people through teaching resources understand where they are and where they’ve come from. And our events, our community, and our strong emphasis on life application and living life on purpose provides direction.

Labs

So how do we go to the lab and make meaning? If our two key words are understanding and directing, then we must take what our offering is and adjust it to provide these two. Some ideas:

Deliver tools that help people categorise themselves. This categorisation helps them define the world within them. Note that this isn’t boxing people in. For example, the book “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Markus Buckingham was meaningful to me because the large set of skills that it assigns you with via the online test helps you better understand yourself. The label increases self awareness with restricting me. Apple do this with their product types – “Are you a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro – or are you an iPod Nano?”
Deliver tools that people can build on. The idea of building platform is what Apple did with the App Store. Because of it, other developers have an income, therefore Apple is meaningful to them. Guardian also did the same with their Open API.
Deliver tools that help people define the world around them. The power of faith is that it gives people a decision making framework through which they can understand their life. Decisions are powerful and when we help people make them and define their worlds, we are meaningful to them. Consider here how powerful youth tribes are in that they provide slang that defines what is part of their tribe, and what isn’t. That slangs defines their world.
Deliver tools that help people direct their life. Or perhaps more pertinently, helps people make their next step. If your offering is making the next step for someone easier, then you matter to them. I’m doing courses with my wife on how to breastfeed, change nappies, give birth, etc, and the fact that these courses are preparing us and helping us make decisions about our life is meaningful to me. They are helping direct us.
Deliver tools that people can use to help others. The power that I’ve seen in affiliate and networking marketing programs is how they give their distributors all the tools in the world to get others on board. And guess what? That type of assistance directs people to do it more, and the original distributor draws value and direction out of this.

More?

For a more in-depth and academic approach to making meaning, read this article that I found on “developing meaningful brands“.

Otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts: how do YOU make meaning?

Your Brand: Is it Making Meaning?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Most brands don’t compel people. Today we’re going to look at shift in the consumer mindset that demands that brands who want to go somewhere must compel them.

Robin Wight said in his insight at Like Minds that brands exist to make the purchasing process easier. This was an eye opener for me because I realised how it is indeed the case that a brand reduces my need for original critical thought and makes me rely on what Robert Cialdini calls fixed action patterns – fixed ways of reacting based on certain mental shortcuts.

Certainly for the majority of brands that you’ll see at a supermarket, that’s their role. But what most of the Friends reading this will be in the business of doing is moving beyond brands that merely make it easier for us to purchase or align with. We are interested in making maning, in aspiration, in purpose, in challenge. Our ideal brand is one that people derive identity from.

The brand on three levels

In an exceptional video entitled Rethinking the Idea of the Brand, Umair Haque talks about three levels of brand. (Thanks to Brian Driggs for emailing it to me.)

Functional brands seek to differentiate one product from another by targeting a particular demographic. This is what Umair describes as the base level of branding.
Aspiration brands emerged as status symbols: I don’t buy a Samsung MP3 player, I buy an iPod. This is where Umair says we’ve been for the last 3 decades.
Meaningful brands are, paraphrasing Umair, where a brand has a tangible output on the consumer’s life in terms that matter for them. He says furthermore than meaningful brands are the opposite of egocentric demand, which he calls alocentric. The general thrust is that a meaningful brand contributes to the human race, not just me as an individual.

(Side note for another discussion another day: I would understand Umair’s description of meaningful brands to be highly linked to community and we could also label them as social brands.)

Overcoming indifference with purpose

The power of the meaningful brand is that is overcomes indifference. With functional and aspiration brands saturating markets left, right and centre, a meaningful brand taps into something deeper than a brand meeting my immediate functional need.

In actual fact, I see meaningful brands as tapping into Maslow‘s top hierarchy of self-actualisation - or as I say – purpose.

Recently I was talking to someone who unites a community of people around an event. They wanted to know where to take the event, and my response was that they needed to go beyond entertainment (uniting people around a good time) and instead unite people around purpose. In other words, make meaning by helping the community make meaning.

As a church pastor, community builder, mentor and with Like Minds, I’ve always seen the direct benefit of basing the orgnisations purpose in the helping of others find their purpose.

How can you be indifferent to something that has helped further you on your quest for purpose and meaning?

Making your brand meaningful

We’ve covered enough ground for today, so tomorrow we’ll discuss just exactly how we make a brand meaningful. And what we need to discuss that is your feedback on this post now. The conversation has begun – now add your thoughts:

How do you move a brand from aspirational to meaningful?
What the meaningful brands in your life?

The Myth of the Personal Digital Brand

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Scott Gould

I wrote on Saturday about The Fight Our Youth Face, discussing the problem that too much choice for our young people has a paralysing effect, and that there isn’t a strong focus on transferable skills.

We talked a while ago about ‘building the kingdom’ – looking at how a strong team is made up of individuals who strongly compliment one another. This is the type of thinking that I’m saying our youth aren’t getting so much of. It requires putting down your ego, and making others kings instead of yourself – being a kingmaker. Contrary to this, most young people want to be the king. Hey, I did, you probably did too.

My concern is, however, that the ‘be the king’ message is way out of hand, and I think it most subtly appears in the whole personal digital brand movement.

What I mean by this is that there is an inordinate emphasis on image and being ‘the social [insert area] guru‘, complete with logo, branded blog, branded avatar, slogan – and then complete lack of actual work. The idea of beefing yourself up is something that Jim Connolly is actually debating right now and is well worth getting in on the discussion.

Again, I’ve been here and made this mistake MANY times. For years I had the issue of having a better logo than actual business, and for years I made myself look bigger than I was. Thankfully, I’ve grown and balanced out somewhat through the mentoring of you guys and others.

But many young people lack this mentoring, and to be honest, we so focus on content online that it makes sense that it would be there starting point, rather than actually creating substance. It seems following is more important than delivering. Continue reading →

A Video After I Voted

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAkRiMiJVaw

If you can’t see the video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

In this video I just share a few branding thoughts and community thoughts over voting. I wrote two very popular posts last month, one called My Vote For Sale: Price Engagement, which was about my disillusionment about the lack of engagement from candidates with their constituencies. It was so popular, that it’s the third result in Google for “vote for sale“.

My second post was about 10 Do and Do Nots for Social Media Campaigning in the Election, which has some great comments and great advice in at the end from all the collaborators around this blog.

This post now wraps up the story really – I voted – but even as I did, there were a few final parts of unengagement that I experiecend. Namely two things:

Continue reading →

How Apple Creates Suspense, Why Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter, and A Lesson From Star Wars

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Scott Gould

I spoke a while ago on the idea of what I’m calling ‘brand mystery’ – we looked at JJ Abrams’ TED Talk and Lost, and how he tells a story by suspense. He never provides the complete picture, and this is what keeps you hooked. This is contrary to what one copywriter thought when he said “every advertisiement should tell the complete story” – to which I wholeheartedly disagree. Discovering a brand, and unravelling its mysteries, is such a rich experience (and one that I’ve been enjoy since childhood) that it ties you emotionally into it for years to come. Continue reading →