Strategy Note 12: Simple Is the Door

The brands that win are usually the ones that made complexity simple.

This sounds like conventional advice. It is also frequently misunderstood.

Simple is not the same as simplistic. Simplistic means shallow, lacking nuance, treating complicated subjects as if they were uncomplicated. Simple means clear, accessible, easy to grasp—without sacrificing accuracy or depth.

If a twelve-year-old cannot understand what you do, your message is too complicated. This is not about dumbing down your work. It is about respecting your audience's attention enough to earn it quickly.

Every layer of complexity you add is a layer where someone can decide this is too much effort and leave. The sophisticated buyer does not want sophistication in your explanation. They want to understand instantly whether you are worth investigating further.

Consider the reality of how people encounter your brand.

They are scrolling, distracted, half-paying attention. They give you perhaps three seconds to communicate something worth stopping for. In those three seconds, complex explanations fail. Jargon fails. Nuanced positioning statements fail.

What succeeds is immediate clarity. This is what we do. This is who it is for. This is why it matters.

The simplicity at first encounter does not preclude depth later. Once someone decides you are worth their attention, you have permission to go deeper. You can explain the nuance, the methodology, the complexity that makes your work sophisticated.

But you do not get to that depth if you lose them in the first three seconds.

Simple is not the enemy of deep. Simple is the door that lets people into the deep.

The work of simplification is harder than it looks. Anyone can make something complicated. Expertise often manifests as complexity—you know so much that you want to share all of it, you see so many nuances that you cannot bear to leave them out.

True mastery is the ability to make the complex accessible without making it inaccurate. To distill without diluting. To clarify without oversimplifying.

When I work with clients on messaging, we often spend more time cutting than adding. The first drafts include everything they want to say. The final versions include only what their audience needs to hear first.

The rest still exists. It comes out in longer content, in conversations, in the relationship that builds after the door has been opened.

But the door itself must be simple enough to walk through without effort.

Stay Curious,