As Leonardo da Vinci put it; Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. I couldn’t agree more.
In my continued series highlighting my adventures in Italy and how they inspire my thinking, I came across this image I snapped a number of years ago. Now, you might find this an uninteresting image – maybe even more after you realize it was taken in a restroom in some off-the-beaten-path trattoria in Northern Italy.
In fact, it IS a rather uninteresting image; a bouquet of freshly cut lavender propped in the window of a restroom in an unassuming eatery. But that’s exactly what struck me.
Simple, fresh utility.
Unrepresented is the high-tech, the new-fangled and the mass produced. Nowhere to be seen is the digital filtration system or the air purifier meticulously researched, tested and deployed. Instead, the ingenuity of the proprietor is laid out before the beneficiary.
Smells good. Looks good. Works good.
As marketers we always seem to get ahead of ourselves and constantly over complicate, over think and overdo it. Remember the much anticipated and talked about luxury Japanese car launch that teased consumers with expensive OOH and then resulted in lackluster sales?
Oftentimes we see creative that loses sight of the strategy and seems to focus more on feeding the ego of the author. We tend to see one creative always trying to outdo the next in a race that goes nowhere except maybe in some industry rag that will collect dust in the cloud and on shelves. Recognition, accolades and handshakes from peers are more often the objective versus simple, provable results.
I like the purity of this image because it reminds me of the simplicity of the situation. Room smells, have garden, room no longer smells.
It also causes the viewer to smile. Why? Because it’s a strategy born out of our humanness. It’s approachable, pure, unadorned.
It gets the job done with obvious intention. Objective achieved.
This reminds me of so many wonderfully simple and powerful marketing strategies that have moved consumers to action. Think about the Lemon ads for Volkswagen in the 60’s. As Larry Dobrow wrote in his When Advertising Tried Harder; “The art direction was so stunningly and deceptively simple.” “the car ran out of gas before the campaign did.”
The simplicity of the campaign represents one of if not the greatest ads of all time. So strategically sound, it sparked the Creative Revolution that changed the way marketers created campaigns.
I believe its simplicity that won the day and in the case of the bouquet of lavender – just a reminder that with simplicity comes sophistication.