Elegant

Why don’t marketers pay more attention to being elegant?

I don’t mean in the mainstream sense, i.e. opulent and beautiful.

I mean the ‘elegant’ that’s used in maths, engineering and chemistry to describe the most intuitive and effective solutions.

Or in other words:

“a quality of neatness and ingenious simplicity in the solution of a problem.”- The Free Dictionary

“the attribute of being unusually effective and simple.”- Wikipedia

So, something is elegant when it’s simple, and effective for it. Like any of the best marketing solutions to have graced our fair planet, surely?

Just think about how neat/simple and effective/ingenious these are: The iPod, The Tap Project or even Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign.

I would argue that Google’s ‘search for ideas that help the most people’, Project 10 to the 100th, will be won by the most elegant solutions. Take for instance, Colalife; the minimal effort required on the part of Coca Cola to make the idea happen (simplicity) is far outweighed by the extent of positive change that such an initiative could create (effectiveness). Therein lies Colalife’s elegance.

In true rock n’ roll fashion, I’ll end with a graph: