A Missive to Marketing: Impose Simplicity

Markets are complex. Customers are complex. Products are complex, sometimes very. Heck, the world is complex. What’s a marketer to do?

Great marketing is about making things simple. We do that by imposing simplicity on a complex world. We might be attacked for so doing — people might accuse us of over-simplification. And we don’t want that either because we need to stay credible. Paraphrasing Einstein, we want to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Consider product marketing. Enterprise software products are enormously complex, built by scores (or hundreds) of developers across quarters and years. They have deep functionality and subtle differences.

But a product marketer, operating in a TLDR world, can never say:

The difference between our product and their product is actually quite subtle and ultimately is about 100 little things; there’s really no one big thing that separates them.

No, no, no. The successful product marketer finds the most important subtle differences, groups them, and amplifies them. Here are our three silver bullet features. Here’s our white paper on The Five Things You Should Look For in a Schmumble.

In so doing, black-and-white is infinitely superior to gray. While sometimes unavoidable, speaking gray (i.e., “our schmumble is better than their schmumble”) is infinitely inferior to speaking black-and-white (e.g., “we have a schmumble; they don’t.”)

The successful product marketer takes a complex, gray world and transforms it into a simple, black-and-white one. If you don’t have row-level locking, you’re screwed. If you don’t have semi-additive measures, you’re screwed. If you don’t financial consolidation, you’re screwed.  If you don’t have hyperblocks, you’re screwed. 

The great marketer imposes simplicity on the product.

Consider corporate marketing, where the goal is simple. Take a complex competitive landscape and position the company as the leader. Not a leader. The leader. “A leader” is complex because it means there are multiple different companies, each of a different size, and each with its own angle on what constitutes the best product. That means customers need to understand all the competitors and their relative strengths and weaknesses. That’s a lot of work.

“The leader” is simple. Define the space in as simple terms as possible — carving it up to make yourself the leader — and then declare yourself the leader. It’s not always possible to do this — at one point, I called out Brio for effectively claiming they were the leading business intelligence vendor — on Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, California.

But if you can do it credibly, then back it up with awards, customer wins, customer counts, and financing rounds. It’s safe to buy from the leader.

The great marketer imposes simplicity on the market.

Consider customer targeting. The world is complex and gray when it comes to targeting. An ideal customer profile (ICP), typically the result of a regression used to identify the best target companies, isn’t black and white. It might output a score that varies from to 0.0 to 1.0. That’s gray. You need to make that black-and-white so sales can use it — e.g., by using it to identify named accounts for sales and account-based marketing (ABM), by using the score to create tiers that follow different processes in the high funnel, or by looking at the model to derive simple rules to say when some opportunities look better than others (e.g., we double our win rate when the customer is using Spark).

The great marketer imposes simplicity on targeting.

Consider messaging. The database reveals that the key contacts at our top 50 customers have over 80 different titles. If we stopped there, we’d end up wasting money buying overly broad lists and with an overly generic message. The great marketer interviews a broad set of customers and discovers there effectively two canonical personas in that set. Precise titles and hierarchical levels aside, there are two different animals: data analysts and data architects. And a VP of data architecture thinks a lot more like a director of data architecture than a VP of data analysis.

They look at things differently. The have different missions within the organization. They have different career backgrounds. They will respond different to sales and marketing messaging. If you want architects to come to your webinar, talk about data transformation initiatives and enterprise architecture. If you want data analytics people to come to your webinar talk about better decisions made more quickly on higher-quality data.

If you want to sell a data architect convince them your system is built for scalablity. If you want to sell a data analyst, convince them they’ll be more productive and make better analyses.

The great marketer imposes simplicity on messaging.

The hardest part of all this is believing with conviction that you have to do it. You’ll be accused of being inaccurate. Others will say you’re over-simplifying. You’ll be told, “well, it’s really not that simple” over and over again. You yourself will start to wonder.

Don’t forget that simplicity isn’t easy. Just as it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, it takes a tough marketer to make a simple message. It’s your job.  A key skill in marketing is the ability to impose simplicity on a complex world.

Your career will depend on it.