Simplicity Marketing
End Brand Complexity, Clutter, and Confusion
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
For more than half a century, marketers have bombarded customers with more and more choices in products and services. What is the result? Unprecedented anxiety. Our mental circuit breakers are on overload. In fact, pioneering brand strategists Steven M. Cristol and Peter Sealey assert that we have reached our manageable threshold for making decisions -- and a watershed in product proliferation. In this pathbreaking book, the authors argue with compelling evidence that the next generation of marketing successes will belong to those brands that simplify customers' lives or businesses in ways that are inextricably tied to brand and product positioning. They contend that if a brand is not reducing customer stress, it is creating it -- and it is vulnerable to losing market share to more customer-empathetic competitors.
Writing especially for product or brand managers who are struggling to simplify their portfolios, Cristol and Sealey have created a breakthrough framework that is itself a lesson in simplicity. After presenting two essential guideposts for managers to assess where their brand sits on the stress spectrum, the authors turn to the heart of Simplicity Marketing -- the 4 R's of simplification: Replace, Repackage, Reposition, and Replenish. Using scores of real-world company examples, Cristol and Sealey show how each of the 4 R's interacts with the others in powerful ways to relieve customer stress and how these strategies may be executed individually or in combination to build brand loyalty. Here for the first time are ten specific strategies to relieve customer stress through consolidating, aggregating, or integrating products and services, repositioning brands for more relevance to stress reduction, and decluttering customers' decision-making requirements. The final pages of this brilliant manifesto for a simplicity revolution provide a guide to managing simplicity strategies, leveraging information technology to simplify rather than complicate customers' lives, and integrating all the tools in the book into an executional blueprint.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an age when Crest toothpaste comes in 45 varieties, consumers long for companies that make life easier by reducing choices, claim Cristol, a marketing consultant, and Sealey, a former global marketing director at Coca-Cola. Playing off the four "P"s (product, price, promotion and placement) that many marketers use to hone their strategic thinking, Cristol and Sealey have come up with four "R"s. "Replace" is shorthand for designing a single product to replace two separate ones (e.g., a shampoo that contains a conditioner). "Repackage" means offering products together that were previously available only in separate locations (e.g., a brokerage firm may choose to sell mutual funds provided by its competitors). "Reposition" entails promoting one's product or brand as standing for simplicity itself (e.g., Honda's old slogan, "We make it simple"). "Replenish" is an odd term for "providing a readily available, continuous supply of zero-defect products or services to the existing customer base... the customer only to make the purchase decision once" (e.g., a McDonald's hamburger in Maui tastes exactly like one sold in Maine). While Cristol and Sealey's focus on simplicity is solid, and their four "R"s make for a useful checklist, their anecdotal examples don't always measure up. Proctor & Gamble, which they cite as an example, has been underperforming, and while McDonald's may stand for consistency, as the authors note, the number of choices it now offers is a far cry from the days of plain old hamburgers, fries and a drink. In the end, more detailed case studies of companies that exemplify each of the "R"s would have helped this effort make the grade.
