Categories: Articles

The New Digital Minimalism

How much of what are you putting online?

I was interested in a mobile app. I went to their website. There was not a lot of information. It featured two actions:

Download the app.
Watch a short video demo.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

There were no other tabs on the website. There were no testimonials, white papers, long-winded corporate drivel, jargon-filled product description and more. This brand was not treating their digital presence as a receptacle for all of their marketing collateral. They were laser focused on one, simple action: download the app. Why? Because we have come to this miraculous point in our business world where technology is removing the technology from technology (read that five times fast). The easier all of this stuff (from the hardware to the apps) is to use, the easier it will be to convince consumers to use them, share them and talk about them. The app is self-explanatory. Once you download it and open it up, all will be revealed.

Simple is as simple does.

It’s somewhat counterintuitive to think like this, but as complex as marketing has become, it is the simplicity of the brand message and product that wins. The latest and greatest stuff doesn’t do everything. In fact, it’s the opposite. The latest and greatest stuff does one simple thing. And, it does it well. We are in the new era of digital minimalism. It is no longer a world where you need to have multiple pages for your website that push linking (internal and external) coupled with keyword stuffed text to game the search engines. The brands that are triumphant in the online world, are scaling back and making the experience as minimalistic as possible.

This will freak out the Chief Marketing Officer.

Marketers are going to have to adjust their attitudes and perceptions as to what marketing can be in this world of the new digital minimalism. Instead of stacking the homepage with the corporate stock price, news feed, product updates and more, the attitude needs to be adjusted. Consumers are moving through content at a voracious pace and yet we (the marketers) still pretend that everything we’re publishing is some kind of destination in their consumer experience. It’s to adapt to the new reality. This is less about short-attention spans and a consumer’s ability to click away in a millisecond, and much more about creating a clear value chain that is steeped in minimalism.

One, simple thing.

If you can get a consumer hooked on one, simple thing, odds are that you can rinse and repeat this process. Many will (sadly) read that last line to mean that they can abuse the marketing flow. Those people will be direly wrong. Think minimalism. Think bare. Think simple. We often toss these words out into the marketing zeitgeist without really appreciating the amazing opportunity that we have – as a marketing industry – to truly add value to the consumer’s life. No brand will ever be able to create the next Twitter without embracing the new digital minimalism.

Welcome to the new digital minimalism.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.