品牌因简单而伟大

如果你在大公司工作，你肯定对复杂性有切身体会：不断扩张的产品线，更加复杂的技术，更多的决策障碍，以及更多被浪费在会议室里的时间。

1997年时的苹果公司（Apple）便是如此。当时史蒂夫•乔布斯在被驱逐了11年之后，重新回到苹果，按照肯•西格尔的说法，他看到的是一家“臃肿平庸”的公司，还有90天就要破产。他改变公司命运的过程，至今依旧被奉为传奇。

西格尔在他的新书《简单思维：聪明的领导者如何消除复杂性》（ Think Simple: How Smart Leaders Defeat Complexity）中写道：“他简化了公司结构，简化了产品线，简化了市场营销。”新书将在6月6日出版。当然，西格尔也指出，并非每一位商界领袖都是史蒂夫•乔布斯，但乔布斯“不是魔法师。他只是用一种人人皆知的按部就班的方法改变了苹果。”

If you work for a huge organization, you know firsthand what complexity looks like: An ever-expanding product line, ever more elaborate technology, more hurdles for decisions to get past, and more time lost in meetings that go nowhere.

That’s what Apple AAPL 0.20% looked like in 1997, when Steve Jobs returned from his 11-year exile to find what Ken Segall calls a “bloated and mediocre” company just 90 days from bankruptcy. How he turned it around is, by now, the stuff of legend.

“He simplified the corporate structure, he simplified the product line, and he simplified the marketing,” writes Segall in his new book Think Simple: How Smart Leaders Defeat Complexity, out June 6. Of course, not every business leader is Steve Jobs, Segall notes, but Jobs “was not a magician. He changed Apple by taking a common-sense step-by-step approach.”

对此，西格尔绝对有发言权。他曾与乔布斯密切合作过12年，他领导的创意团队创作出了苹果公司“非同凡想”的广告，并通过命名iMac，将“i”这个简单的字母成为了苹果公司的代名词。在广告业巨头TBWA\Chiat\Day漫长的职业生涯当中，西格尔还曾为许多公司创作过成功的全球品牌宣传广告，如IBM、戴尔、英特尔、宝马等。

在《简单思维》一书中，西格尔并没有长篇大论地讲述大公司如何消除过度的复杂性。这本书通过对40多位高管（包括多位初创公司创始人）的采访，就如何将简单化付诸实施，提供了发人深省的见解。西格尔将这些高管称为“奉行简单化的英雄”。

例如，跨国公司倾向于为不同的地域设计不同的产品。西格尔指出，除了所谓“对文化敏感性真实的、深刻的、合理的需求外”，“有些价值是跨越文化的。”他写道，聪明的公司不会轻率地为各个国家或地区提供不同的产品，采取不同的营销手段，而是会选择围绕一种普世价值，组织公司的产品和想要传达的信息。苹果公司凭借“非同凡想”取得了成功，而可口可乐和最赚钱的汽车制造商等，也做到了这一点。西格尔与原苹果公司市场营销负责人史蒂夫•惠希特进行过一次吸引人的对话，探讨了创建一个惠希特所说的简单的“可以传播的品牌”，能够带来哪些优势。惠希特曾经为日产、现代和大众设计过全球品牌宣传活动。

有时候，真正吸引客户的“简单”恰恰在于其“不简单”。粉丝们都知道，Ben & Jerry冰淇淋有大块的曲奇饼干、糖果和漩涡形的馅儿。至少在最开始的时候，要做到这些比你想象的难度更大。该品牌联合创始人杰瑞•格林菲尔德对西格尔解释说：“传统的冰淇淋机只是设计用于处理小块的配料。我们是第一家解决了如何添加大块配料的公司。大规模采取这种做法非常复杂，但在客户看来，这个过程非常简单。”西格尔用完全属于广告人的语气说道，即使虚幻的简单化“也能推动公司发展”。

在有强大内部文化的公司，简单化可能是每一位员工都知道并坚持遵守的一系列想法。目标是通过消除多层基层监督的必要性，简化公司结构。例如，Container Store自1978年成立以来，每年以至少20%的速度增长（并且连续15年，入选《财富》100家最适宜工作的公司榜单）。公司制定了所谓的基本原则，由七条基本规则组成，公司将这些规则反复灌输给每一位新员工，比如友好对待店铺的供货商和超出客户预期等等。

公司CEO基普•廷德尔告诉西格尔：“我们还不够聪明，无法告诉数千名员工在具体情况下应该怎么做。我们根本都没有尝试去这样做。我们只是让所有人认同这些非常简单的原则。之后我们就让会让他们自由发挥，根据这些原则选择处理方法。”

怀疑论者可能会质疑，基本原则每天得到的关注，真的会多于多数公司的使命宣言吗？但廷德尔坚持认为，这些原则“不止是挂在墙上的标语。我们的员工一直都在讨论它们。这些原则总好过一位专横的老板告诉你要做什么。”并且更加简单。（财富中文网）

Segall had a ringside seat for that. Working closely with Jobs for 12 years, he led the creative team behind Apple’s “Think different” ad campaign, and made the simple letter “i” synonymous with Apple by naming the iMac. In his long career at ad giant TBWA\Chiat\Day, Segall also cooked up successful global branding campaigns for the likes of IBM, Dell, Intel, and BMW.

In Think Simple, he never quite gets around to spelling out how huge corporations can banish excess complexity. What the book does offer is a thought-provoking view of simplicity in action, drawn from interviews with more than 40 executives (including a few startup founders) Segall calls his “heroes of simplicity.”

Take, for example, global companies’ penchant for designing different products for different geographic markets around the world. Beyond what he calls the “real, profound, and sensible need to be culturally sensitive,” Segall points out that “there are values that transcend culture.” Instead of unthinkingly piling on a different product with different marketing for each country or region, he writes, smart companies aim to line up their product, and their message, with one of those universal values. Apple pulled this off with “Think different”, but companies like Coca-Cola and the most profitable automakers have figured it out too. A fascinating chat with Steve Wilhite — an erstwhile Apple marketing chief who has built global branding campaigns for Nissan, Hyundai, and Volkswagen — looks at the advantages of creating what Wilhite calls a single, simple “brand that travels.”

Sometimes, what appeals to customers as simplicity is, in reality, anything but. Fans know Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for its big chunks of cookies, candy, and swirls. These were, at least initially, trickier to achieve than you might think. “Your classic ice cream machinery is only designed to handle small bits of things,” co-founder Jerry Greenfield explained to Segall. “We were kind of the first to figure out how to add in those big chunks. It’s very complicated to do this on a large scale, but to our customers it looks simple.” Sounding every inch an ad man, Segall notes that even illusory simplicity “has the power to drive a business.”

In companies with strong cultures, simplicity can take the form of a set of ideas that every employee knows and sticks to. The goal is to simplify the structure of a company by eliminating the need for layers of front-line supervision. The Container Store TCS -1.49% , for instance, has grown at least 20% annually since its 1978 founding (and has made Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For ranking for 15 straight years). Its so-called Foundation Principles are seven basic rules drummed into each new hire, like treating the stores’ vendors well and exceeding customer expectations.

“We’re not smart enough to tell thousands of employees what to do in a given situation,” CEO Kip Tindell told Segall. “We don’t even attempt to do that. What we do is get people to agree on these very simple ends. Then we liberate them to choose the means to those ends.”

Skeptics might wonder whether the Foundation Principles really get any more day-to-day attention than most companies’ mission statements . But Tindell insists that these ideas “aren’t just words on the wall. Our people are constantly talking about them. Having these principles is much better than having a bossy boss tell you what to do.” Simpler, too.