Simplicity Marketing: Relieving Customer Stress in the Digital Age, Steven M. Cristol and Peter Sealey (Free Press, 2000). From the beginning of time—business time, that is—smart managers have moved their organizations forward by questioning their core assumptions. To do that, they’ve found new lenses through which to reassess long-established practices. Deming’s quality lens is a good example. Through it, companies began to understand the wrenching changes needed to remain competitive in newly globalized markets. In Simplicity Marketing: Relieving Customer Stress in the Digital Age, Steven M. Cristol and Peter Sealey present simplicity as an equally powerful lens for marketing. The authors cite stress as a major factor in contemporary consumer psychology: markets are faced with too daunting an array of product and service choices. To alleviate customer anxiety, the authors claim, companies should stop extending product lines and creating new brands; instead, they should consolidate product and service functions by following their four R approach: replace, repackage, reposition, and replenish. But is simplicity thus defined as powerful a lens as quality? Only if we agree with Simplicity Marketing’s tacit message that the Internet does not constitute a radical rite of passage into a truly new economy. According to the authors, simplicity and permission marketing—simplicity marketing in another guise—allow companies to retain, or more accurately regain, some measure of control over their markets. But whatever comfort this notion brings comes at the cost of self-delusion. Since the advent of the commercial Internet, markets are in control. Business as usual is not alive and well; the Net has called code blue on the marketing department, and it’s flat lining. When open heart surgery is the only recourse, prescribing a simplified lifestyle, or a please-and-thank-you rationale for the same old high-cholesterol Spam, comes a day late and a couple trillion dollars short. “As with the segmentation process, traditional approaches to prioritizing segments for targeting are not meant to be thrown out,” Simplicity Marketing assures. “They are meant to be enhanced by considering customer stress as another important variable.” But the dynamics the Internet brings to bear on market interactions raise fundamental questions about the viability of conventional segmentation and targeting. By freighting old concepts with new parameters, the authors seem to be suffering from their own denigrated incrementalism. Even while they acknowledge debate about whether the four P’s of conventional marketing are still valid, Cristol and Sealey glibly position their four R’s as complementary elements. “Regardless of which side of the debate you’re on, the 4 Ps are still the foundation learned and used by most marketing managers for planning and execution.” With that weak disclaimer—the familiar “everybody’s doing it” defense—they neatly sweep aside challenging and potentially enlightening questions about how marketing fits into the digital age. The same kind of slippery trope appears at the beginning of the book. “How,” the authors rhetorically inquire, “did we get to a consumer world of 40,000 products in a supermarket, hundreds of long distance and cellular calling plans, 52 versions of Crest tooth-paste?” But the question is never answered. Historically, the explosion of consumer choice resulted from competition for unprotected niches, first from small domestic producers and then from large international companies seeking to penetrate lucrative U.S. markets. These competitors were effective because the companies whose share they went after were often arrogant and complacent, believing they were impervious to attack. Think Honda Civic. Think Sony Walkman. The Internet has vastly accelerated that trend. Just as auto executives in the late 1960s dismissed the VW Bug because “only students drive them,” businesses missed the early importance of the Internet because “only students log on.” Today, competition is coming not only from offshore but in far greater measure from agile Net upstarts catering to Web-based micro markets that don’t raise a blip on the demographic oscilloscope. Most companies still mistakenly believe they are in control of their markets. But on-line, the market is the competition. Think Linux. Think Napster. Corporations have earned reputations for self-serving consumer manipulation, and marketers have lost credibility. Today the marketplace is connected, networked. Consumers are talking among themselves, and that changes everything. Cristol and Sealey argue that markets are stymied by too many options and must depend on vendors to make sense of their world. For this they will be grateful, and gratitude will beget trust, trust will beget loyalty, loyalty will beget greater market share, and greater share will beget new profits. Thus runneth the prophecy. But the prophets are wrong, and the profits are not forthcoming. Markets are not stymied. In the digital age, markets are rapidly becoming smarter than the companies that pretend to serve them. Faced with an overwhelming array of choices, consumers are turning to the only source they trust: each other. On-line exchanges like this are routine: Question: I’m trying to get my head around the differences between products X, Y, and Z, and I’m getting a migraine from all the marketing double-talk. The pricing schemes look like they were invented by Rube Goldberg. Can anyone help me sort this stuff out? Answer (received ten minutes later): Forget those products—I’ve used them all and they all suck. Take a look at a little company a knowledgeable pal turned me on to. These folks got it right. Their site isn’t fancy and they won’t send you four-color brochures, but there’s an on-line demo that’ll blow your mind. Also, because they haven’t invested in the usual “brand” nonsense, you’ll pay a lot less than you would have for X, Y, or Z. This outfit deserves more recognition. If you’re as impressed as I was, spread the word. If X, Y, or Z is your product, say goodbye to your $ 10 million simplicity marketing campaign. Because word will spread—like wildfire. This isn’t viral marketing or permission marketing or simplicity marketing. It’s just real simple. Given the right vector—and the Internet has supplied it—people will talk about the products they hate and the ones they love. The latter will be well designed, address real needs, and be backed by straight-talking customer service. You got a problem? Bummer, dude. And bam! It’s fixed. That’s simplicity. “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” said William of Ockham almost 700 years ago—a formulation that has come to be known as the law of parsimony, or Ockham’s razor. In nonphilosophical terms: “keep it simple, stupid.” If marketing simplicity boils down to elegant, responsive product design, quality craftsmanship, a clear articulation of the product’s features, and attentive customer service, why inflate such a perfectly useful concept into a theory that invokes neologisms such as “overchoice,” “brand soul,” “brandscape,” and “stressographics”? There’s nothing simple about reducing people to data-based demographic profiles, and nothing respectful about painting targets on their backs. If you really want simple, try telling the truth. While this prospect strikes terror into the hearts of those whose mission it is to package segments and deliver eyeballs, even the most conservative marketing department now has a highly credible model it can emulate: Ford. If you really want simple, try telling the truth. In May, the company issued a “corporate citizenship report” in which it noted that more people get killed in sports utility vehicles—including its own Explorers and Expeditions—than in non-SUV crashes. It also said it wasn’t too happy about the lousy gas mileage of SUVs, as it’s damaging the planet. The media was surprised that the company would be so forthright, but as Debbie Zemke, Ford’s director of corporate governance, says, “For heaven’s sake, everybody else is talking about it, so why shouldn’t we?” Ford’s willingness to tell the truth may seem especially surprising since we’ve been conditioned by Nicholas Negroponte’s wired/tired dichotomy that bits are way cool but atoms are old hat. Ford is a very atomic company—a rust belt NYSE discrete manufacturer, not a Nasdaq dot-com darling—so it must not “get it,” right? Wrong. Companies like Ford were among the first to feel the fire of global competition. The notion that comfortable and familiar business practices didn’t really need to be challenged head on—as so many palliative business books imply—was a recipe for certain death. Ford was the first major U.S. company to go through Deming’s total quality transformation. The company radically rethought its entire purpose. Perhaps most important, it drove out fear. Fear masks arrogance, which in turn masks the kind of ignorance unable to admit it needs ideas that were “not invented here.” Managers from the CEO on down had to become humble enough to realize that the workers they’d been bossing around for better than half a century often knew more than they did. Ford began listening to its workers. So did General Electric. Jack Welch got religion for self-directed teams and process mapping. The results spoke for themselves—not just competitive survival, but better products, profits, and work environments. Now these “old economy” corporations are listening again, extending the same attention to their markets through the Internet. This has nothing to do with demographic segmentation or facile tricks like permission or simplicity marketing. It’s about acquiring critical knowledge and understanding that intellectual capital has little to do with ownership today, and everything to do with invitation, access, and enthusiastic bottom-up community action. Is open-source marketing an impossible oxymoron? Again, think Linux. Think Napster. Atomic tortoises like Ford and GE may turn out to be faster companies than digital hares like Intel, Microsoft, and IBM. Ford, for instance, announced in March its plans to supply home PCs and Internet connections to nearly 400,000 workers worldwide. With one stroke, Ford has opened itself to the marketplace as no company has ever dared. Its workers will fan out on-line and tell their own stories, not about Mustangs and Explorers and Tauruses but about the kinds of things human beings tend to get excited about: what kind of education their kids are getting, why government is so broken, how Grandma won the chili cook-off at the state fair, where wireless technology is headed, and the pros and cons of starting a chinchilla ranch in Tasmania. Atomic tortoises like Ford and GE may turn out to be faster companies than digital hares like Intel, Microsoft, and IBM. You want real simplicity marketing? Speak boldly and don’t carry a big shtick. Most of the “thinking” in marketing these days misses the boat. Mass markets have been steadily fragmenting for at least three decades. They are being replaced by vibrant micro-markets just now emerging from the Web. They don’t show up on corporate radars tuned to lock onto only mass-market targets of opportunity—or the fragmented debris of former mass markets, which is what conventional segmentation keeps desperately trying to salvage. You want real simplicity marketing? Speak boldly and don’t carry a big shtick. Welcome to Gonzo Marketing Micromarkets are coalescing in real time around articulate, entertaining, and knowledgeable voices. An off-line example is Click and Clack, the car guys on National Public Radio. A Web example is Motley Fool, the personal investing site. Internet communities have always been self-selecting—audiences gather around content of high personal interest. In this organic aggregation, the Internet is far more efficient than conventional media. People find what they want not as much through advertising as through testimonials from friends and colleagues. “Micromedia” Web sites will replace advertising inasmuch as they quickly become the best source of credible user-supplied news about products and services. (Amazon broke new ground here when it invited customer reviews.) Potential buyers will not have to hunt down this information; it will be posted on their favorite on-line venues. Such an open exchange of information is a much better solution to the “problem” of choice than manipulative strategies like simplicity or permission marketing. Companies that engage in this type of dialogue will forge powerful relationships with micromarkets that will soon become their major source of revenues. But how will they engage? For nearly a century, companies like Ford have told workers to check their brains at the door. Corporations broadcast work orders down a tiered bureaucracy and broadcast orders to the marketplace: buy our product! But they have much to gain by learning what’s in their workers’ brains—and not just the sorts of things they do on the job. Just imagine how Ford might benefit from releasing all those workers into an open market. Suppose Ford discovers, through offering Web space to self-motivated employees, that one tenth of 1 % of its work force are gung ho organic gardeners. Why would a car company care about that fact? Two reasons: first, 400,000 people is a pretty fair sample of the population at large, so it’s reasonable to guess that a similar tenth of a percent of its market are organic gardeners. Second, Ford also sells trucks, and gardeners tend to haul stuff around that they wouldn’t want to put in the back seat of the family sedan. Thus, such a micromarket includes excellent prospects for pickup trucks. Ford would want to introduce these workers to one another and suggest that they build an organic-gardening subsite at ford.com—on company time, of course. Imagine the enthusiasm generated from being paid to do what you love instead of what you’re told. Then Ford would find the best voices within this group—the most articulate, engaging, and informed—and make them emissaries to the best external organic-gardening Web site. Call it Organic Gardening World, OGW for short. These ambassadors would then approach this best-of-breed site bearing gifts: cash, server hardware, technical assistance, even reverse ad banners to drive traffic from ford.com to OGW. Say this site has a regular audience of 5,000. Ford would want to grow the audience to 500,000 as quickly as possible. It would also want an exclusive relationship with respect to competitors. OGW could have other underwriters, of course, just not from the likes of GM, DaimlerChrysler, or Toyota. Ford’s money would enable the OGW site developers to quit their day jobs in some corporate cube farm and work full time on what they love. Notice that love is a powerful motivator on both sides of the equation. And it is an equation—perhaps better, an equator. When organic gardeners click the banner on the OGW home page that says “underwritten by Ford Motor Company,” they would not be transported to ford.com but to ford.com/organic-gardening. There they’d encounter Ford employees who share their passion for mulch and fresh corn on the cob. These two groups also share an active interest in pickup trucks, automatic lift gates, and power take-offs. Does this intersection of common interests hold more promise than conventional advertising? How much might it be worth to find out before competitors do? Imagine taking this one step further. Suppose Joe Smith is Ford’s primary ambassador to the OGW site and is highly visible in posting there. It’s part of his job. He doesn’t write about Ford products but about his knowledge of organic gardening. Now say Mary sends him a private e-mail: “Joe, I know you work at Ford. I wonder if you can help me. I bought an Explorer a while back, but the driver’s side door is sprung and my dealer is giving me the runaround.” Joe tells the executive VP of customer service, and 20 minutes later Mary gets this note: “Mary, Joe tells me you’re having problems with your Explorer. Sorry to hear it. Call Bill Jones at the number below and schedule a time to have it fixed. I worked it out with Bill to take care of you at no charge.” How many times would a company have to comp such service to gain evangelists it could never buy with a $ 100 million ad campaign? Welcome to gonzo marketing. Hunter S. Thompson, founder of gonzo journalism, defined it by saying, “The writer must be a participant in the scene while he’s writing it.” Such participation is the exact opposite of “objective” journalism that pretends to have no perspective, no point of view. Every Web site worth its salt is an act of journalism, offering the news of some passionate interest and engaged advocacy. By participating in the life of such sites, corporations can forge powerful relationships with emerging micromarkets. This is a win-win, not a zero sum, model. Everyone benefits: the corporation, its workers, external site producers, and their audiences. Could there be problems of undue corporate influence on content? Sure. But these are no different from the problems faced by traditional publishers, which set up “church and state” boundaries between advertising and editorial departments. A site with many underwriters will be safer from such influence; and a company seeking an unfair advantage would risk permanently ceding its relationship to a competitor—not a real swift idea. Why would a huge corporation get out of the way and enable mere workers to speak on its behalf? Because people want to talk to people, not flacks and lawyers and scripted marketing zombies with hidden and none-too-friendly subagendas. Why would a company used to dictating to its markets via broadcast advertising suddenly switch gears and pay attention? Because markets are in control today; they hold the critical knowledge. Intellectual capital is no longer a strictly internal affair. Conversations with relevant micro-markets will become crucial sources of insight and innovation, and the quality of this market intelligence will ultimately determine market share. Without such interactions, efforts to simplify products and services take place in a vacuum. People want to talk to people, not flacks and lawyers and scripted marketing zombies with hidden and none-too-friendly subagendas. Products must reflect genuine esteem for workers and customers, not the self-congratulatory ballyhoo and adversarial targeting tactics surrounding the concept of brand today. When that happens, companies will be far better served, and so will their markets. It’s that simple.
