EMBA的小眼睛

Obvious or elegant?

A friend used to eat a food, out of a white generic can, that had one word on the label: MEAT.

On the other hand, Vogue magazine isn't called, "That magazine with expensive dresses and skinny sad models".

It's really tempting to believe that the answer to your marketing problem (what to name it, how to describe it, what to write about it...) is to be obvious, brutal, direct, hyper-clear.

And that can certainly work. It works for fire alarms. It works for actionable, compelling direct marketing copy.

But for the rest of us, the rest of the time, it's elegance that lasts. That's because elegance trusts the user to make the connections, gives the user the power to build a use case, earns a secondary meaning.

Hoover, Starbucks, Slack, Shinola, Highway 61 Revisited, the speeches of Rev. King, the By the Way Bakery...

Committees are bad at this. A group of untrained folks searching for a word or phrase tends to push toward obvious.

If no one says, "huh, I don't get it," you've built the obvious, not the elegant. Elegant takes a moment to get.

Obvious is a trap, the last resort of an artist who can't think clearly about what to do next.