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Make simplicity your top priority

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One of the great challenges in business communications is making a computer-generated letter sound personal and still achieve its goal.  It’s not easy to make a collection letter feel like it was written to an individual, to walk a line between friendly and firm and recognize that many of the recipients are embarrassed to be getting letters like that.  I was asked to do that a few years ago, overseeing a project where we rewrote more than 700 letters of various intents to credit-card customers.

Despite positive feedback, we were told to change them back a few months later because many of our internal constituencies didn’t think friendly and empathetic was the right approach.  Sigh.

That’s why I particularly liked this Ted talk from branding pioneer Alan Siegel, whose corporate tagline is Simple is Smart.  In this speech, Siegel describes simplicity as “a means to achieving clarity, transparency, and empathy, building humanity into communications.”  And he practices what he preaches…delivering a speech for what is normally a 15-to-20-minute time slot into just over four minutes.


Siegel is behind the YMCA’s new rebranding strategy, changing the name to “the Y” to reflect the nickname everyone has used for generations, although somewhat inexplicably, the Y is asking newspaper editors to refer to individual branches by the old name (e.g., the YMCA of New York City).  This could be described as a “Twitter strategy,” where companies like National Public Radio and Kentucky Fried Chicken have now become NPR and KFC to fit into what some analysts describe as “a bite-size space.”

Siegel’s message is simple, yet few have embraced it.  What can you do in your daily actions to make clarity, transparency, and empathy into a national priority?  How can you overcome the barriers that the lawyers and the politicians often put in place to make that goal such a challenge?


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