By Chandeepa Wettasinghe
The corporate and academic sector in Sri Lanka was recently given a lesson on the power of simplicity by Ken Segall, who was the Creative Director of Apple Inc.’s advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day. Segall worked closely with Apple Founder/CEO Steve Jobs for 14 years, thereby having a comprehensive insight into Apple’s theory of simplicity.

Segall was directly involved in the world famous ‘Think Different’ campaign, and was responsible for creating the ‘i’ found in Apple product names when he named the iMac—for a Macintosh that goes on the Internet. Jobs had opted for ‘MacMan’ and Segall said if he hadn’t intervened, people would be travelling with MacPods and MacTalks in their pockets.

“Being simple is better. Everyone on earth knows that. The interesting thing about simplicity is that everyone knows that but they don’t think about it. A lot of leaders talk about making things simpler-- their internal organisation or whatever-- but simplicity is so taken for granted because it’s obvious and people don’t pay attention to it. The great thing about Steve Jobs is that he didn’t take it for granted. He would beat it into people,” he said.

Jobs was known for his intimidation tactics, and Segall said that he was lucky to be beaten up only twice in his 12 years of working with Jobs.

Despite carrying out a simple process in terms of product development, Jobs was not a simple man. He was kicked out of his company for being hard to work with. He converted to Zen Buddhism, but upon returning to Apple as it was reaching bankruptcy in 1997, he halted all philanthropic programmes conducted by the company, and never restarted them upon reaching profitability.

However, Segall noted that it was the simplicity principle which made Apple into the world’s largest company—in terms of market capitalization—within the span of 12 years since 1997, and his consultancy days with companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard led him to writing the book ‘Insanely Simple’ and conducting forums on simplicity.

“They’d spend 3 times as long and spend 3 times as much money and what they ended up with was not nearly as good as what we did with Apple. What is interesting is that when these companies operate in a complex manner, they’re sort of defeating themselves. This gave inspiration for my book,” he said.

Segall said that when a company does something simple, it stands out from the general noise of trends by making it easier for customers to use products, thereby becoming popular.

“For example, Apple would never dream of making a TV remote like Sony or Toshiba would. Apple put three buttons on the thing; the things you do every day. There’s no mistaking what you do with it. If you want to do something less ordinary, you can go deeper. But there’s no need to put 30 buttons in to navigate when you can do it in three buttons,” he added.



US’ most endearing technology brand 
He said that Apple became America’s most endearing technology brand through this simplicity and that the company has never produced a brand advertisement since the ‘Think Different’ campaign; as the product advertisements became brand advertisements through the simplicity of Apple products. He also said that the simplicity created brand loyalty.

“Simplicity is love. If people have an emotional attachment to Apple, they will always forgive the mistakes we make. Lot of companies didn’t realise this and customers would just leave. Steve understood the importance of building a brand which was that strong and loved,” he noted.

He expressed that if common sense prevails, products and services will become simpler. He gave an example of how even government services became simpler, with the US Postal Service—earlier loathed by US citizens—becoming endearing to the public.

“There’re these different denominations of stamps. They’d change it at least once a year. It goes from 13 cents to 19 cents to 23 cents. You’ll have all these stamps lying around. If you have to send a letter, you’ll have to hobble them together. It was kind of annoying. So one day the postal service said; ‘let’s make a stamp called the forever stamp. You buy it one time, and whatever the going rate is, you can mail a letter today, tomorrow, five years from now. We’ll honour it,’ and it’s one of the things you look at, and say; ‘Wow, was that so hard?’” he added.

Segall said that doing fewer things better also adds to the theory of simplicity; criticising companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Asus for having dozens of laptop and desktop models, while Apple had just three laptop models and two desktops branded Macbook and iMac, respectively, which could be configured in numerous ways.

He further said that words matter—not just in naming product series in a simple and easy to understand way such as the iMac, iPod, iPad—but also in using words to gain customer loyalty. Segall said that during product launches—videos of which have been viewed millions of times online—Jobs would charismatically use “because we care about you” dozens of times within the span of an hour.

Segall said he had recommended the companies he provided consultancy to follow the Apple model in minimizing the product portfolio and simplifying the names, which the companies had promised to implement but hadn’t gotten around to.

In his opinion, making products simpler and promoting brand loyalty would allow companies to set higher prices. However, Segall does not seem to have taken into consideration the various needs of the lower income segments which Apple does not cater to.

Meanwhile, he said that internal company structures could also be made simpler to boost the performance of the companies.

“In many companies, the highest decision-makers are only involved in the final stages of a process, so they don’t get to see ideas which were considered and thrown out. That’s the difference at Apple. Steve was involved in the process from the beginning.

Segall admitted that not everything which worked for Apple will work for other companies due to differing circumstances, but said that most simplicity principles can be taken and applied to many businesses to become better.