Reduce The Complicated.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about the beauty of simplicity.

The most beautiful things found in nature are also the simplest: a sunset, a flower, a snowflake, a fruit tree. They are marvelous because they are simple. Their form is dressed in elegance, and they fulfill their purpose perfectly. In fact, there's no one, other than Mother Nature herself, who could ever improve their simplicity.

The most memorable and effective marketing campaigns are also the simplest. A friend of mine began his marketing career on Madison Avenue, coming up with big ideas for top brands. One of the best campaigns he worked on was the "I love NY" campaign—three black letters and a red heart on a white background. So simple! It is absolute genius.

There have been many times in my career when I allowed my insecurity to step in and make a hot mess out of a great idea. Like a fool, I piled on more and more complexity until the idea had little choice but to die of suffocation. The truth is, there's no challenge in business too complex that it cannot be solved with a simple answer. I just wasn't smart enough or confident enough at the time to appreciate the brilliance already present in the original idea. As today's fortune says, "Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple."