In his latest for B&T, Managing Director – Strategy and Innovation, DDB Group Australia, muses on the demise of the Zune. The reasons for its failure, in his mind, are beautifully simple.
In November 2006, Microsoft launched what it considered to be its iPod killer.
iPod had become a wildly successful portable music device, and Microsoft was determined to win a slice of this lucrative and growing market.
They launched with three portable media players with 30GB to 120GB of storage for songs and media, alongside a music subscription service (before Spotify was even thought of) and a marketplace for music, TV and movies. The system was named The Zune, or Zune for short.
But by 2011, the Zune line of portable media players was discontinued, and by 2012, Zune’s digital content distribution store was also shuttered.
What happened?
Simple. It wasn’t easy enough…
Let’s start with pricing.
In the USA, songs for the iPod were priced at 99 cents each, with a discounted price if you purchased the artist’s entire album.
Zune, on the other hand, made you buy “Microsoft Points”, which required customers to purchase points by the hundred and then use a conversion rate of eighty points to the dollar to buy a 99 cent song. Confused? So were their customers.
Secondly, the product itself was complicated. Steve Jobs had applied his legendary focus to the iPod and made it the world’s best portable music player, no more and no less. Zune, on the other hand, broadened its scope to include music, TV, movies and also streaming services for its Xbox 360 games console.
Finally, because the product offering itself was too complicated, the marketing followed suit.
Whilst iPod could simply promise “1000 songs in your pocket”, Zune launched on a platform of “portable perfection” which promised a lot but said nothing in particular.
Technically, Zune was a far superior music player, but customers rejected this superiority and instead prioritised simplicity.
This story suggests that all businesses should work hard to make things easy for their customers, but unfortunately, businesses are addicted to complexity. Evidence for this can be seen in product returns in the United States. Up to 15 per cent of all returns, totalling more than 80 billion dollars per year, are because products are just too complicated. This percentage is even higher for technology devices. Research has shown that we spend just 20 minutes trying to figure something out, then we give up.
If the business case is so clear, why are companies knowingly making things more complicated than they need to be?
The answer can be found in a psychological concept known as complexity bias.
All of us like to overcomplicate our roles, tasks and responsibilities at work. It makes us feel knowledgeable, special and valuable.
We use jargon when easy, plain words would work just as well, and we like to explain things in terms of cause and effect, rejecting the notion that success is due to random chaos, chance or just good old-fashioned luck. Because overcomplication offers a kind of exclusivity and job security, businesses and the people who work there are naturally suspicious of simple things.
Feature creep, or additive processes, is another consequence of complexity bias. It is much easier to add to an already existing process than to subtract, and leaders are naturally biased to doing more, not less. An extreme example of feature creep is Microsoft Word 2003, which featured 31 toolbars and more than 1,500 commands.
Ironically, these same people who create complexity at work long for simplicity and ease when they become consumers.
Those same people who designed the Zune product also bought the iPod by the millions.
Steve Jobs insisted that if you wanted to listen to a song on an iPod, you had to get there in three clicks.
The iPod shuffle is perhaps the easiest-to-operate electronic product ever made.
You can turn it on and off.
You can turn the volume up or down.
You can skip to the next song or back to the previous one.
And you can set it to play songs in sequence or choose them randomly.
Basically, all it does is play songs at different volumes.
It’s simple.
The same psychologists who coined the term complexity bias, also gave us the ironically complicated name “cognitive fluency” to describe our love for ease and simplicity.
This bias doesn’t just turn up in the products we buy, it also turns up in culture.
One of the most iconic and replicated images of the 20th century, the smiley face, is not only disarmingly simple, consisting of a large circle, two smaller circles and a curved line, it took the artist all of 12 minutes to conceive it.
When we say someone has an “easy swing” in golf, we are admiring their skill and style, and when something is beautiful, we say it is “easy on the eye”. “Easy listening” music is a genre associated with relaxation, and the nickname we gave the iconic Volkswagen Beetle is the much easier to say “Bug.”
So, if businesspeople are prone to complexity, but consuming people are biased to simplicity, what can be done to close the gap?
It would appear the only answer is leadership.
Complexity is a choice that leaders make, or more accurately, don’t make. By not addressing this head-on, organisations become more complex over time. Because their employees’ urge is to create complexity, and the leader’s instinct is also that more is more, the natural evolutionary direction is inexorably towards the increasingly complicated.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As businesses have become ever more complex, the operating environment seems to have become increasingly complicated too.
Most leaders would respond to the benign question “how is business going” with something along the lines of “everything’s more complex now”.
So, are we all destined to live in an increasingly complicated world, and therefore live with increasingly “cognitively disfluent” products and services?
Not necessarily.
Simplicity is intentional. And ironically, it takes enormous effort, much more than is required, to remain complex.
We have to fight our natural instinct, and instead of just adding more, we have to work even harder to look at what we can take away.
But if a leader can achieve this, and it flows through to the end customer, the benefits are enormous.
Apple, with its relentless focus on simplicity and making things easy for the consumer, makes just five product lines, and although it has a tiny market share, it gobbles up most of the profits in any category it enters.
In a world where businesses thrive on complexity, while customers crave simplicity, the path to increased sales and cherished products is to work hard at making things easy. Beautifully easy.
