Complex Is Easier than Simple

In high-tech marketing, the trick is to explain without appearing to.

This week’s Tech & You column in Business Week (“Why iPhone Wannabes Don’t Cut It”) illustrates once again an important industry lesson -- usually the simpler a technology is to use, the more complex it is under the hood. Furthermore, it’s the simplicity that sells, not the complexity -- because making something look simple is hard. Competitors would do it if they could. Phones that look like the iPhone, and even have some similar features, “don’t cut it” because they make it too difficult for people to actually use those features.

The same lesson applies to technology marketing. The simpler and more clear-cut the value proposition, the more it will stand out. Yet many marketing programs seem to follow the opposite idea — that the more complex you can make a product look, the more buyers will be impressed.

Vendors probably let themselves be hard to understand for the same reason they let their products be hard to use: complex is easier than simple. I know for a fact that it’s a lot easier to write a complex PowerPoint or white paper than it is to write a “simple” one on the same subject. In fact, it’s doubly hard in high-tech because buyers actually do attach a price premium to technology advantages under the hood. The trick is to “explain” without appearing to.

Take my client SendZa, which has just introduced a VoIP to SMTP gateway technology. That’s a mouthful, but what it really does is enable you to send an email and have it received as a voice phone call. To explain and convey the value proposition, I invented a hybrid case study / data sheet on a single page. There’s one for each of three target markets -- education, government, and public safety -- each with different needs (which must also be explained in the technology context). I have combined the three pages here as a single PDF.

The writing is a lot more complex than it looks, and that’s the point.