Less really can be more…

I’m grateful to PIA Member, Noel Farrelly, who alerted me to a recent article in The Spectator by Rory Sutherland.

“It reminded me of what you’ve just done with EC,” Noel explained “You’ve made it a lot simpler.”
Noel’s right, of course, as you’ll see in a moment. And he’s also bang on insofar as there is much thought-provoking in this piece for any entrepreneur. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“McDonald’s got rid of cutlery. Uber does not allow you to pre-book taxis. Amazon began by selling only books. Conventional logic would suggest that successful innovations are best when they allow you to do lots of things.
Actually, if you want your innovation to change behaviour, it is often best to launch an innovation which does only one thing. It is much easier to adopt a new technology if its function is unambiguous. The device solves one simple problem, and solves it very well.
I have never had much luck with multi-purpose kitchen devices. Although theoretically they have a plethora of different uses, their application is so vague that you end up not using them at all. You may have a microwave which also contains a grill function. Have you used it more than twice? I doubt it.
The temptation is always there for manufacturers to add functionality to things — since conventional logic suggests that more must be better. What takes real genius is to leave things out.
Akio Morita (1921–1999) came from a Japanese family which had been involved in the production and sale of soy and miso sauce since the mid-17th century. With his business partner Masaru Ibuka, he founded Sony in 1946.
Large magnetic tape recorders were the company’s first area of focus, later followed by the first fully transistorised pocket radio. But perhaps his greatest moment of genius involved the creation — almost from nowhere – of the Sony Walkman, the ancestor of the iPod.
walkman
It is hard to remember how revolutionary this seemed at the time.
To anyone born after 1975, there is nothing outlandish about people walking around or sitting on a train wearing headphones. I was born in 1965. Let me assure you, in the 1970s this was a very odd behaviour indeed; analogous to the early days of cellphones in the late 1980s, when to use one in public carried a high risk of abuse. (I can also remember seeing my first jogger in the 1970s and assuming for a moment that he was being pursued by some unseen assailant.)
In market research, the Walkman aroused very little interest and quite a lot of hostility. ‘Why would I want to walk about with music playing in my head?’ was a typical response.
Morita ignored this. The request for the Walkman had initially come from the 70-year-old Ibuka, by then honorary chairman of Sony, who wanted a small device that would allow him to listen to a full-length opera on his many flights between Tokyo and the US.
When the engineers came back, they were especially proud. Not only had they succeeded in achieving what Morita had briefed them to create — a miniature stereo cassette-player — they had managed to include a recording function in the Walkman. I imagine they were crestfallen when Morita told them to remove it.
Because of the technology involved (the innards of the Walkman were in part derived from a miniature dictation machine), and given the economics of mass production, the addition of a recording function would have added no more than a few dollars, if that, to the final cost price.
Why would you not add this significant extra functionality to a device if it were only to add an insignificant increment to the price?
Any ‘rational’ person would have advised Morita to go with the engineers’ advice. I’m pretty sure I would have done so. According to many stories it was Morita who vetoed the addition of a recording function.
Why?
Morita’s argument was that the presence of a recording function would confuse people about what the device was for. Is it for dictation? Should I record my vinyl record collection on to cassette using the device? Should I record live music?
By removing the recording function from the earliest Walkman devices, Sony produced a device which had a smaller range of uses — but a far greater potential to change behaviour.
By narrowing the perceived uses of the device, it meant that it could do only one thing: this made it much easier to adopt the new behaviour — since there was only one possible behaviour to adopt.”

Interesting, isn’t it?
I’ve certainly been guilty in all of my businesses, of trying to pile on value by adding more and more and more to what we sell. A more traditional marketing slant on it could be that I added ‘features’ but little ‘benefits’.
EC did evolve into something complex and we have simplified and streamlined what we do for 2016. We’ve got four levels of membership – but what each one offers is clear. Crystal clear.
It wasn’t before.
It’s a fine line, of course, but there’s little doubt that keeping things simple is rarely a poor strategy.
Forty years on I can still remember the words drilled into me – and all my team-mates – by my first ever football coach, Mr Bulmer. “Simple things, done well, look good.”
It’s true on a football pitch and it’s true in business.
Simple things, done well, tend to look good, work nicely and make good businesses.
Everyone knows where they stand.
Clarity.
What would Akio Morita make of your business right now?
Is there a metaphorical recording button in your proposition?
Could/should you seek to simplify what you do?
Doing less (well), really can deliver more. Sony proved it in the seventies and the twenty-first century comparisons are all around us…
Food for thought indeed. Thanks Noel.
Excerpt © The Spectator 2015. Reproduced with permission