Decoding the Magic Behind the World's Simplest Brands with Brian Rafferty | Ep 65

Branding Deep Dive with Ahmed Cheema

Today we’re talking to Brian Rafferty. Brian is the Global Director of Business Analytics and Insights at Siegel+Gale. Siegel+Gale is a global brand experience firm. They partner with the world’s leading corporations, nonprofits and government organizations to build brand experiences that are remarkably clear and unexpectedly fresh. In other words, simple. For 10 years they’ve released an annual report on the World’s Simplest brands. This year’s report surveys over 15,000 consumers in 9 countries, across 25 industries, covering over 800 brands in total.

In this episode we dive deep into the world’s simplest brands report, why its so important to keep your brand simple, how big corporations with multiple business units like google and amazon stay simple, why Apple never really does well on the world simplest brand reports, how to strike the balance between digital experiences and human experiences, and much more.

If you feel like your brand is way too complicated for your consumers, you’ve come to the right place.
Key Lessons:

1. Simplicity pays - since 2009 a stock portfolio of the publicly traded simplest brands in the global top 10 has outperformed major indexes by 1600%
2. You don’t need fancy design to be simple, you need to make it easy for your consumers to understand what your promise is and then to over deliver on that promise. The reason apple doesn’t rank highly is because people have high expectations of simplicity from apple and they don’t always live up to that promise.

Links:

• Siegel+Gale
• World's Simplest Brands Report
• Siegel+Gale Linkedin
• Siegel+Gale Instagram