Can you be too easy?

The famous Staples 'Easy Button'

Can you be too easy? Well, your mother might disagree but the answer is an emphatic NO – you can never be too easy.

It’s all too easy to forget, but making things easy should be at the core of everything we do: easy for consumers to understand why they need our products; easy for customers/retailers to place orders and sell heaps of product; easy for consumers to buy what they want when they want it. All it takes is approaching every task you do by asking the bold yet simple question: “what can I do to make this easier”.

A great example is from author Jenny Blake and her recently launched book ‘Life After College’, introduced via the always interesting TheDominoProject. Jenny’s book is positioned as “an essential manual for every graduating student and young professional. It features practical, actionable advice that helps people focus on the BIG picture of their lives, not just the details”.

Getting great reviews and recommendations is key to a successful launch of any book (or product!) and it seems so often that brand custodians just cross their fingers that bloggers or other reviewers will take it upon themselves to spread the word. Jenny is doing it differently, by creating a resource on her website full of all the information that any blogger, reviewer or salesperson could need: check it out here.

She goes beyond the standard bio details, expanding to including sample tweets, emails and varying length synopses to promote the book, which can be easily copied and published in any medium. There are links to the book trailer on YouTube and links to the facebook page, as well as more formal and also quirky information about Jenny and links to previous interviews. Jenny is acknowledging that her supporters are busy and even with the best intentions getting time to create a mention promoting her book is tricky. Some will take up her suggestions verbatim, while others will edit a little to personalise: we all know that it is much quicker to edit an already prepared document than to start from scratch.

There are two key benefits here: firstly, the easier (and quicker) you can make it for people to spread the word, the more people will take up the opportunity. Secondly, through giving suggestions of how to word the comments, Jenny begins to create a consistent theme in how people talk about her book, resulting in a clearer, more focused message. Jenny’s approach recognises what we already know from our own lives: we are busy and the easier it is to get a job done the more likely we are to do it and do it well.

Making things easier can apply to absolutely everything we do, big or small:

• Is it easy to go through the checkout process on your site- do you force endless data entry and password setting up, or do you give shoppers the opportunity to buy quickly when they want to?
• When you submit your expenses to your boss do you write her name and the date in the approval box, so all she has to do is sign it?
• Is it easy to get into your shop? If the door is super heavy get it fixed, or if you cater to mums make sure a pram can navigate inside easily.
• When you get into work do you make sure the photocopier is stocked with paper so it doesn’t run out in the middle of a rush later in the day?

I love this statement from Eric Schmidt, EC of Google, (who interestingly Jenny Blake used to work for) describing their approach to employee benefits (note my bolding): “The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees’ way. We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses – just about anything a hardworking employee might want. Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.”

Just taking those few seconds to ask the simple yet revolutionary question of “how can I make this easier” can change your world. So who do you know who’s making things easy? What have you done to make your world easier?

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Getting Tossed with Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver

Have you ever had that experience when you remembered something so basic that you were surprised that you had ever forgotten it in the first place?

My epiphany this week was courtesy of Jamie Oliver, and his “30 Minute Meals” show. The way he builds a salad is interesting – make the dressing in the bowl, pile the salad leaves etc on top and then toss the whole lot with your hands just before serving.

Which made me realise that I had somehow forgotten the difference that tossing a salad with the dressing makes. I have been pouring the dressing on top, and then forcing myself to consume the “good for me” salad – after watching Jamie I tried his technique myself and the results were revolutionary: what was my boring old salad was suddenly full-flavoured and tasty and just delicious. Getting your hands in is a bit mucky (and yes you need to wash them first!) but it does the best job.

Loving this on a couple of levels: firstly, my salad tastes great, so bring on the healthy eating. On a broader level, it’s inspiring to find someone standing out in the super saturated cooking show/cookbook world by reminding consumers of the basics, but also doing it in a different, practical way.

So how does it apply to the brands and businesses we work on? It’s worth examining what we assume our consumers already know, as sometimes revisiting the basics and communicating them can be more powerful than a newfangled innovation.

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Help Me!

Help I have a headache, from Help Remedies.

Do pharmaceutical brands need to be so boring? An intriguing brand arrived in my inbox this morning courtesy of Contagious Magazine. Products from the pharmaceutical industry seem unified in their loud, blustery voice as they force their way into being the essential salvo to every little ill. Effective as this approach is (these are BIG brands with BIG spends and profits to match) when everyone is doing the same thing it becomes boring, and when boring translates to low engagement, ultimately a weakness.

So let’s look at someone who is doing it differently: Help Remedies is a US based company which offers a tight range of simple, practical essentials which can fix a headache or protect a cut.

The packaging is fantastic: clean, clear design, with very straight forward naming “Help, I have a headache” is the name of the headache pills, “Help I can’t sleep” for sleeping pills, and “Help I’ve cut myself” for sticking plasters: you get the idea.

They have taken the sleeping aid even further by ‘helpfully’ suggesting different dream ideas, and these are brought to life beautifully in some otherworldy ads which I am sure are generating some great viral. Read Contagious Magazine’s take on the ads here. It would be interesting to know how mainstream the media buy is.

Pricing is super-simple: each product costs the same (although with a differing number of pills per pack) – this is spot-on for a brand promising to help simplify things.

The “bored?” page is worth a look, bringing to life the brand with some clever, very obscure help for a variety of esoteric ailments – actually more than some, I liked that there were a lot of things to play with on this page, these dalliances are not just some add-on from marketing, they are central to bringing the brand to life in a less traditional way. The “I’m Sleepy” is addictive! On the home page try clicking on all the packs to make them all disappear, and then see what happens: it’s touches like these which flag the design and advertising backgrounds of the founders.

This irreverent approach to the category is refreshing, I look forward to seeing what they do next.

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