EmailWhen I play a video game, I always put it on the “Ridiculously Easy” setting. Heck, my favorite card game is “Go Fish.” I’m entertained by simpletons like Forest Gump, and I laughed at the “Double Rainbow” guy on YouTube about 437 times.
When it comes to e-commerce, I like to keep things like navigation and overall usability extremely simple. You don’t want to make people think when it comes to that. The old K.I.S.S. Rule (Keep it Simple, Stupid) certainly can apply online to many facets of doing business.
However, there comes a point when keeping it simple can become insanely stupid. On Twitter, there are folks who routinely spam the #ecommerce hashtag promoting a certain shopping cart with the slogan, “The universal truth of selling online: Simple Wins.” What exactly do you win there?
When I think about “winning” online sales, I think of winning over more customers and beating the pulp out of the competition. However, winning should never be self-indulgent, as the term often implies. Winning in business is dependent upon positively impacting the lives of others for mutual gain. If you don’t do that, you lose.
So, if the goal is to create a compelling brand that engages the hearts and wallets of your customers, what is involved in the creation process? Just like any good recipe, more than one ingredient is required. Although I don’t have the space here to offer a lengthy dissertation on creativity, I’m about to offer up a few special ingredients you may have not considered.
We need to start thinking of brands as people. I don’t know very many “simple” people, do you? People are often extremely complex, with layered perspectives and feelings about many different things. Even those that keep their life exceptionally streamlined typically have a lot going on upstairs. Give anyone two years, and they can grow into a very different person.
Although the complexities of human beings can cause tension at times, they are also what keep us engaged and intrigued. I would dare say the unpredictable “mystery” of relationships has fueled romances and best-friendships throughout history. When people become predictable, we become bored. Therefore, if we don’t want to command boring brands, we need to dig deeper.
What am I really saying here? That tension and mystery is good for your brand and therefore your business as a whole? Absolutely, but let me explain further.
“Brand tension” occurs every time two seemingly disparate elements combine to form a new whole. When you have a little green gecko become the hit, personable mascot of an insurance agency like “Geico,” brand tension exists. When Disney began to successfully produce action movies and thrillers instead of just cartoons and other family-friendly fare, this threw an undeniable curve-ball of tension into what had started to become a fairly predictable trend.
When you begin to introduce brand-tension to your company, I call it the “What-the-Hell? Factor.” It makes your customers and even your competitors watching you say, “What the hell?” And that’s a good thing.
The very idea of brand tension and mystery is anathema to some business owners. We are oftentimes obsessed with the idea of becoming known for one thing or another that we fail to realize familiarity can also breed contempt. It’s time to assess whether our brands are really evolving or if they’re becoming trite and unimaginative.
When you stay simple, you become an easy mark for your competitors. They see you standing still, making it easy for them to figure out your angle and thus replicate any success you’ve experienced. That’s the beauty of raw creativity: it cannot be placed in a jar and put on the shelf. The creative entrepreneur realizes that they must keep creating in order to maintain the vitality of their business. Far too often, an entrepreneur will have “creative seizures” whereby they will expend energy on a key project to revolutionize their business, only to quickly embrace another longstanding status-quo.
Your customers love a good mystery. They’re intrigued that you want to engage and entertain them on a visceral level, as well as simply sell them something. When your customers truly enjoy your brand, they’ll buy more from you. If you simply become yet another online resource for obtaining a certain type of product, you become part of the scenery and never a landmark.
See, anybody can throw up a website and try and sell somebody something. That’s simple. It takes a special kind of entrepreneur to invest in the power of their brand to impact the lives of customers, which is more difficult but infinitely more rewarding. For them and for you.
As I have said many times before, creativity must be partnered with strategy in order to be successful. Wild, undisciplined creativity can run a business into the ground, because there are no parameters by which to operate. Every creative brand strategy must be built around the core values of servicing customers, or it is destined for failure.
Customer-focused creative strategies incorporate brand tension and mystery in a way that will delight the end-user. Without strategy, introducing these creative but radical elements can have devastating consequences. If you introduce a “What the Hell?” idea without tying it to the customer experience, they will reject that like Chinese leftovers.
I can think of several major brands that have recently committed tremendous blunders because their creativity was essentially built around the belief that it’s “time for a change.” They went ahead full-steam with a new but hollow direction, leaving their customers miles behind. It doesn’t matter what your friends and focus-groups say about your awesome new brand strategy; it’s not effective unless the customer says it is.
You see, strategies driven by values will create authenticity for your brand. Your customers will rightfully believe that everything you roll out is for their benefit, done so in a way that feels genuine to them. They’ll then reward you with the classification of being an “expert,” not just on the products you sell but on the needs that they have. Because their needs are always evolving, so should our brands.
Brand evolution, my friends, is never simple.
Next week, I’ll be going into detail about when to embrace design simplicity for your website and when you need to turn up the volume. Get a friend to sign up as well! You’re not going to want to miss the exciting stuff we have rolling out for you over the next few months.
If you enjoyed this article, let’s keep the discussion going. You can follow both @ericyonge and @eystudios on Twitter, or become a fan of ours on Facebook.
Thanks very much, and I’ll see ya next week!
-Eric
