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Feb 24th, 2010 by Alan Siegel

America’s Crisis of Complexity: Alan Siegel’s Speech from TED 2010


Photo above from the TED Conference Photostream

How is it that we can run the country with a 16-page Constitution, yet it takes 2,074 pages and more than 400,000 words of gobbledygook to present the Senate Health Care Bill?

Washington insiders told me that if they ever passed this bill, over 40,000 pages of turgid regulations would follow before it became law in 2014.

Clearly our public officials have completely lost touch with the power of simple expression.

The social and economic costs when government fails to communicate can be considerable. When Americans can’t figure out how to complete their tax forms, apply for student loans, qualify for small business assistance, or understand their Medicare or Social Security benefits, the economy suffers, federal revenues decline, and confidence in government takes a dive.

(more…)

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tags: clarity, ideas, simplification

Jan 2nd, 2010 by Fred Burt

Clarity for competitive advantage: a business opportunity

There was further coverage this weekend in the UK in The Times of the systematic sharp practice shown by the large UK utilities, in this case British Gas (Buyer beware or be fleeced, TimesOnline, January 2, 2010). In essence, the trick goes something like this. Write a polite letter informing customers that there will be some changes to their account, keep the terms vague or obscure, and tell them that everything is OK and that they don’t have to do a thing.

The sting in this tail is that British Gas was, in fact, proposing to hike the customer’s gas rates up by 42%…and then when they were challenged by the customer, they instantaneously reduced the price raise down to a mere 0.4%, calling into question just how ‘necessary’ the price rise was in the first place. Indeed, it raises the wider question of whether British Gas has been getting away with unnecessary 40%plus rises across a wide and unsuspecting swathe of its customer base.

This is, of course, terrible practice and relies on customer ignorance and inertia on the one hand, and a lack of a decent alternative on the other. The journalist concludes that the only way around this is to switch and switch frequently.

However, this situation provides a huge opportunity for British Gas’s competitors. Tell the customer what they currently pay, what they’re going to pay, why the changes are occurring and what they need to do next. As consumers become more and more aware of just how much they are being gouged they will look to a more trustworthy alternative. If one of British Gas’s competitors can be consistently clear, they will be the warm embrace that customers turn to.

In fact, Ofgem, the regulator, could be stepping in here. Require the utility companies to be transparent and let’s see whether they try and get away with raising prices by 40% plus at a time. The Financial Services Authority’s Keyfacts initiative has started the process of requiring financial services providers to be clear and easy to compare. Why not introduce similar requirements for utilities, which surely must be simpler to implement. This has got to be in the interest of the customer.

In the meantime, the opportunity remains clear for the utility providers: clarity for competitive advantage.

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tags: Transparency, clarity, simplicity, simplification

Dec 29th, 2009 by Fred Burt

As good as your word in 2010

Language has become slippery, tricky, legally grey, politically charged, deliberately unclear.

Which is exactly why the word, written and spoken, is a huge opportunity for brands. The world is crying out for clarity in language. No hiding, no wiggle room, no deliberate grey. Black and white, please.

2010 has to be the year when businesses, private and public, big and small, look to re-establish trust. Clarity will be key, and the word will be the means to deliver this clarity.

But being clear is not easy. It requires discipline, hard work and, in case we forget, a proposition that really motivates your audience.

We will be working for many utilities, financial service providers, telecoms and public sector clients this year. Our primary task will be to make their statements, websites, bills, and other information-rich interfaces more effective.

But actually, we’ll be giving them the ultimate proof point that they mean it when they say to their customers they are going to be more open. That they’re as good as their word.

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tags: brand, clarity, information design, simplicity, simplification

Dec 28th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

Plain talk replaces police lingo

I cheered when I read that police departments around the nation are rapidly dropping their “10 code” lingo in favor of Plain Talk radio transmissions. The events of September 11 precipitated the changeover when dozens of emergency responders couldn’t communicate because each had their own set of coded messages.

It is a classic example of how “insider jargon” can be both glamorous and dangerous at the same time. I admit I loved Adam-12 and other television shows and movies that glamorized police jargon—after all responding to a 10-22 sounds a bit more intriguing than chasing a burglar. Speaking in code is fun when it makes you feel part of a club. But, it can be dangerous when it becomes exclusionary in a moment of crisis.

I’m hopeful that the medical profession will jump on this bandwagon. It’s disconcerting when doctors and nurses ask, “How are you doing since the cabbage?” when you have just had major surgery and haven’t eaten in days. Most open heart surgery patients don’t know that a Coronary Bypass is called a cabbage by doctors and nurses (some shortening of Coronary Arterial Bypass and Graft).

So, over and out for now.

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tags: clarity, complexity, jargon, plain English, simplicity, simplification

Dec 15th, 2009 by Dona Wong

“Great presentation. You are a rock star!”

That’s what you want to hear after you step down from the podium.

Getting to that point can be painful for many professionals though. Most people create presentations by trial and error, often co-mingling clear and concise copy with complex graphics that yield no benefit to the audience. As in creating any communications piece, attention to clear mechanics, simple style and artistry is key to designing good information graphics. Yet 99 percent of presenters make charts and graphics on the fly, right before show time.

As a result, many presenters lose their audiences in slide after slide of complex charts and graphs that muddy the message they’re trying to deliver.

Working at Siegel+Gale, a brand consultancy and pioneer in simplified communications, I’ve combined my training in information design with simplified communications techniques to help an array of audiences communicate their messages clearly. Whether it’s reporting financial information, creating a client presentation, interactive communication, or customer document, understanding how to design information graphics that complement the message is key to business success.

In my new book, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics, I begin with the basics – the data content – that drives all graphics. You will learn to make the right choices about filtering and displaying your data. For example, plotting a stock index in actual values versus plotting the percentage change will yield two different pictures. By charting the same data in a different framework, you provide a new reference point for your audience. When you supply the reference point, you control the message.

The book goes on to cover how to use colors to your advantage, how to manage costs and resources through the use of graphics, and many other practical applications through numerous dos and don’ts.

The great feedback that I’ve gotten from reviewers shows that graphics sensibility is an essential ingredient of effective business communications today. After reading the examples from the book, you will never look at any communications piece the same way.

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tags: clarity, complexity, design, information design

Dec 3rd, 2009 by Jeff Lapatine

The Siegel+Gale Moniker Monitor: Smartphones

There are many factors that affect how consumers make decisions about product brands. As practitioners in the brand strategy and naming field for over 40 years, we understand the nuances of what drives brand choice. One thing that’s highly important is the right product name .

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to, from time to time, visit the marketplace and ask consumers directly what they like or don’t like about certain product names.

Introducing the Siegel+Gale Moniker Monitor™.

Each month or so, we’ll select a different product category, do some market research (online survey with about 400 statistically significant potential purchasers), and find out what people think about the names of some newly launched products. This month, we’ve picked cell phone/smart phone names.

What do people think about today’s cell/smart phone names?

These days, so many models are being introduced that it’s hard to keep them all straight. We wanted to know to what degree their names have an impact on what phones consumers buy.

We picked seven cell phone/smart phone names to test (without mentioning the manufacturers):

Comeback
Glance
LX-290
Ozone
Smooth
Surge
Tritan


We asked the following five questions:

Is it a good name for a cell phone/smart phone?
Does it sound cool?
Is it intriguing and does it make you want to find out more?
Does it suggest an innovative product?
Is it a unique name?

And here’s what we found out:

1. The more powerful sounding names scored best. Tritan and Surge consistently did better in response to all of the questions. That is, these names were the most appropriate, cool, intriguing, innovative, and unique. They’re also the names that people said they most preferred.

Why did they do so well? These names not only sound strong, but they capture the promise of power, speed, reach and connectivity—qualities essential to wireless service.

Most Preferred Names

2. Comeback performed by far the weakest against the questions. It’s also the name people least preferred.

Why would Comeback do so poorly? In naming, you need to be careful about unintended negative connotations. People might associate the name with previous performance problems or the fear that they may have to return the phone for repairs.

3. Interestingly, the alphanumeric entry LX-290 did OK. While people didn’t think it was a unique name, it did just about as well as Glance, Ozone, and Smooth on appropriateness and innovation. The letters LX, borrowed from car model naming, implies superior quality and luxury. We’ve seen this well-established naming convention do very well for computers and sporting equipment as well. It would make sense that it would resonate with phone buyers.

4. How important is the company name in driving the purchase decision? Apparently, very. Only 17% of the subjects found the model name more important, while 49% found the company name to be more important. In fact, 19% of those didn’t know the model name of the phone they currently had.

5. At the end of the survey, we asked the subjects to tell us which of the names they remembered. Here the results were a little different. Tritan and Smooth were the most memorable. Least memorable were Surge and Glance. So while Surge was a preferred name, it was hard to remember. Go figure.

So, what can we take from this study? It seems that power and innovation prevail as key attributes. And alphanumeric models, though not exciting, do better than names with vague or confusing brand benefits.

In the end, Tritan seems to be the kind of moniker that’s a good fit and one that consumers remember.

What do you think? Leave a comment or email me (jlapatine@siegelgale.com) with your thoughts.

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tags: baby boomers, brand, clarity, marketing, naming, research, technology

Nov 20th, 2009 by Alan Siegel

Alan Siegel on CNN Situation Room

Siegel+Gale Chairman and CEO Alan Siegel provides a clear, simple solution to complex credit card agreements on CNN’s Situation Room.

Watch “A rush to simplify credit card ‘gobbledygook’“.

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tags: Transparency, clarity, media mention, plain English

Sep 14th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

How Target Came Close to the Bulls-Eye

Yesterday, Target Stores ran a very interesting two-page ad in the nation’s major Sunday newspapers. It showed five customer e-mails that were essentially complaints about Target’s customer service and provided five very clear, action-oriented responses. What was most refreshing was that they acknowledged flaws: “You could do a much better job of replenishing your stock, especially in food” and “Can you please have your employees be more friendly and say ‘thank you’?” What’s more, there was no weasel-wording, no equivocation in the responses. It would have been far more common for the company to respond by saying you must have met our only rude clerk. Instead, they described exactly what their customer service expectations are for friendly service and provided the specifics of the behavior they expect from their checkout personnel. They also made it clear that they had provided personal replies to each customer email and provided a link to solicit any ongoing feedback.

So, if they sincerely want one more comment, I do have one small gripe. The ad stated, “On May 31st, we published an invitation in this newspaper: Tell us what more we can do for you. 627 of you e-mailed Target…” When I read that in Newsday I interpreted it to mean 627 people from that readership but then I read the same figure in The New York Times later that day. So, I presume the total national response was only 627 people—how small was this previously published “invitation?”—now I picture it being one of those legal notices and perhaps not such an earnest request for feedback. So, in my opinion, Target came close to a bulls-eye but fell a bit short of the mark.

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tags: brand, clarity, simplicity

Sep 8th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

$25 billion? Use Short Form; $100,000? Use Long Form

Little did I expect to find a nugget of simplification in an article about Henry Paulson and the distribution of TARP money, but that is exactly what I found in the October 2009 issue of Vanity Fair. It seems that while homeowners were asked to read and sign dozens of pages of legalese to get measly home mortgages, the CEOs of the nation’s major banks signed a lightly populated two-page commitment to borrow billions. Consisting of four clear, concise bullet points, the “Application for TARP Capital Purchase Program” demonstrates that the need to get something done is best achieved through brevity and clarity. There was no time for the banks to take the application away for legal review and wordsmithing—four clear, one-sentence bullet points stated the commitment each bank was making.

If billions can be borrowed on a short form, can simplified applications for car loans, mortgages, and student loans be far behind? Will the CEOs of these banks consider the time, money, and effort they would save if they adopted this approach in their day-to-day transactions? Why, that would be an economic stimulus in its own right.

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tags: clarity, complexity, information design, simplification

Oct 23rd, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn

How Many Ways Can You Misinterpret Unsubscribe?

I have been getting emails from a reputable organization which are of no interest to me because they are statistics about money flows in mutual funds. I had erroneously subscribed when I thought it was a different type of data. So, today I tried to unsubscribe. And this is what I got as a confirmation email acknowledging my request (I’ve masked the name of the organization).

We have received a request for the removal of your email address, “ireneetz@siegelgale.com” from the www-update@lists.oho.org mailing list. To confirm that you want to be removed from this mailing list, simply reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact. Or visit this web page:

http://lists.oho.org/mailman/confirm/www-update/761256e6d2e5b7df1ffdcbaa335f133f7bddead0

Or include the following line — and only the following line — in a message to www-update-request@lists.oho.org:

confirm 761256e6d2e5b7df1ffdcbaa335f133f7bddead0

Note that simply sending a ‘reply’ to this message should work from most mail readers, since that usually leaves the Subject: line in the right form (additional “Re:” text in the Subject: is okay).

If you do not wish to be removed from this list, simply disregard this message. If you have any other questions, send them to www-update-owner@lists.oho.org.

Is this a joke? Instead of giving me four unintelligible options, how about one that is clear? Why must I jump through hoops to stop getting emails from them? Does anyone realize that this message is literally jibberish? Do I really need to be protected from “unsubscribe” pranksters–if such a class of criminal really exists?

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tags: clarity, complexity, unclear instructions

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