More Marketing Tips

• • How to Make Your Idea Stick
• • How to Perfect Your Sales Copy
• • The Power of Simplicity in Marketing
• • Funnel Your Efforts in the Right Direction
• • Only As Strong As Your Weakest Touch Point
• • Smart Companies Get People Talking
• • 6 Steps To Customer-Centric Writing
• • Sell With Words That Inspire
• • Creating a Category of One
• • What's Your Marketing I.Q.?
• • Four Keys to Building Customer Relations
• • Spicing Up Your Voicemail Greeting
• • Create the Need
• • Backstage at Disney
• • Eye-Stopping Headlines
• • Focus Check
• • Guerrilla Marketing Rule #6
• • Powerful Business Cards
• • Design Direct Mail That Sells
• • Create a Great New Logo

The Power of Simplicity in Marketing

You have an upcoming marketing or sales campaign and want promotional materials that have the right combination of imaging, color, design, and narrative to make the biggest impact on your customers. How can you design the right balance for your materials to make that impact?

Balancing Perfection and Excellence

The 19th-century American essayist, Henry David Thoreau, had great advice for us living with the overload of the information age: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand..."

On the other hand, we can temper Thoreau's advice with a caveat by Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." So how do you strike a balance between perfection and excellence? What are the enemies of simplicity?

The Enemies of Simplicity

Marty Neumeier addresses the enemies of simplicity in his book The Brand Flip. The enemies of simplicity, according to the author, can sabotage your marketing in 7 ways:

So, remember that in our enthusiasm to succeed, we can create clutter. Start simple and build that foundation. To paraphrase our friend Thoreau, your castles in the air are where they should be. "Now put the foundations under them."

The Brand Flip

by Marty Neumeier

Best-selling brand expert Marty Neumeier shows you how to make the leap from a company-driven past to the consumer-driven future. You'll learn how to flip your brand from offering products to offering meaning, from value protection to value creation, from cost-based pricing to relationship pricing, from market segments to brand tribes, and from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment.

In the 13 years since Neumeier wrote The Brand Gap, the influence of social media has proven his core theory: "A brand isn't what you say it is - it's what they say it is." People are no longer consumers or market segments or tiny blips in big data. They don't buy brands. They join brands. They want a vote in what gets produced and how it gets delivered. They're willing to roll up their sleeves and help out-not only by promoting the brand to their friends, but by contributing content, volunteering ideas, and even selling products or services.

At the center of the book is the Brand Commitment Matrix, a simple tool for organizing the six primary components of a brand. Your brand community is your tribe. How will you lead it?