I just wrote about boredom in a previous entry. And right after I hit "publish" on my Windows Live Writer, my RSS reader told me that Seth Godin just wrote something about "dumbing it down".
He writes about pandering to the masses and dumbing things down - and argues that hey, give me smart customers anytime because they are far more profitable, far more energetic, far more engaged.
Why?
The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?
Dumb customers.
And (I'm generalizing here) dumb customers don't spend as much, don't talk as much, don't blog as much, don't vote as much and don't evangelize as much. In other words, they're the worst ones to end up with.
I honestly don't think there dumb customers (and I believe that Seth Godin is being sarcastic...) Ogilvy said that "the consumer is not a moron; she is your wife".
I have sat down in so many client-agency meetings where clients go "That's too sophisticated for our customers; they wouldn't understand that" or "It's nice and witty - but won't it be too witty to our consumers" or "Just tell them the specifications of our products - that we have GB of storage that could store X thousands of songs and videos" or "just plaster the brand logo there - and we'd be fine".
In other words, "dumb it down because consumers don't understand it".
This runs counter to my belief that we are overly underestimating our customers and our target consumers. If they were "dumb", then we wouldn't have all these things called FaceBook, Wikipedia, and other tech wonders that were dependent on these "dumb" customers.
Simplify it, yes. But don't dumb it down. That's what I would say. Simplifying it is not necessarily dumbing it down. Simplifying it is all about making things intuitive, for example, in a computer software.
(And this is why I like XLSTAT and XLMINER - they're advanced stats software but they're not assuming I am dumb; they just made how I use their software easier and faster.)
Anyway, the same is true with people: Don't dumb people down. When you explain things to your subordinates or your peers, don't dumb it down. Simplify it. But don't dumb it down.
Here's Seth's Blog on Dumbing down.
