The uprise of Minimalist Marketing

The world today has captured us in a chaotic web weaved of an enormously crazy amount of information. This clutter of information, overflowing from all sides, is contributing to a brewing tempest in our minds, making us feel cramped and intense, overwhelming us with a deluge of choices.

It has thrown a fresh challenge at the marketers to capture the attention of the masses who are looking for an escape from this farrago. The earnest desire to express to one’s fullest had long since caught the marketing world in a razzmatazz, alienating it from the clandestine need of the human mind carving for silence.

However, marketers are now realizing the subtle strength of minimalism in designs and use of fewer words, and the calming ripples it sends across the human brain. This fresh approach being adopted in advertising and marketing is thankfully relieving us from this commotion of unnecessary excess.

Minimalism is an upcoming trend we are staring at, that the world has chosen as a recovery resort. It is the style in which the simplest and fewest of elements are used to create the maximum impact. It is everywhere. You can find it in almost all the art forms, in music, in literature, in the media, in architecture, and in food.

A minimalist lifestyle is in vogue with more and more people turning towards it to get back the peace of their minds and create room for what is important and eliminate what isn’t.

Influences from Japanese traditions

The idea of incorporating Minimalism in design seems to have its roots in the Japanese tradition of Zen Philosophy. Zen concepts of simplicity transmit the ideas of freedom and the essence of living. The Japanese aesthetic principle of Ma refers to empty or open space. The emptiness of spatial arrangement is another idea that reduces everything down to the most essential quality.

Minimalistic storytelling and blogging

Terribly Tiny Tales was a phenomenon that beautifully encapsulated literature in minimalism, touching hearts and narrating stories as we had never thought before, with the least use of words possible. Micro-fiction writers became a huge hit as these tiny tales captured our imagination and emotions in the fewest numbers of characters.

“Tiny” was termed as the next big thing.

Twitter was the minimalist response to blogging, shrinking down the message to its bare essence and communicating the necessary. It was refreshing to quickly get the gist of the post in a short, straight to the point format without needing to read something that takes too much time. The success of Twitter has proved that the world is yearning for a detox from the excessive information it is bombarded with from all sides.

?Minimalism in User Interface Design

What makes Google the most popular search engine in spite of alternatives like Bing, which are equally good and remarkably similar when it comes to basic search results? It is, in fact, argued that Bing’s video search is much better than that of Google. Yet, it hasn’t been able to compete with Google in terms of the share market. The secret of Google’s unanimous appeal lies in its simplicity of design. Google’s interface leads the user directly to those functions which he’s looking for, conspicuous elements of the page. By keeping the rest of the space blank, Google drives all our attention to its logo, leaving us amazed every day at the creativity and relevance of its doodles.

 Crafting Minimalist Ads

What aspect of Minimalism appeals to the human mind? Is it a retreat from the heavy detailing and saturation of information that demands a longer time to process? Or an excuse for the dwindling attention spans of our generation? Minimalist ads are creative and cheekily dare the audience to do their own thinking.

They engage the audience, stimulating their mind instead of shouting out the obvious and forcing them to read flashy, embellished messages. The audience is left with a sense of satisfaction of having deciphered the concealed message.

Designers of such type, need to be creative and imaginative to create powerful minimalist ads and target a specific audience with very little signs and words.

The key lies in the perfect usage of elements such as space, visual hierarchy, and color.

The goal of advertising remains undeterred, to convey the message across with clarity and effectiveness of the product or service.

Many brands have got it right and have given us some beautifully crafted and memorable print ads.

Berger’s ad for natural finish colors showing a man painting the billboard with the color of the sky, delivers the message aptly without any use of words, with the color of the sky perfectly matching the color of the paint.

A similar concept was used by Faber Castell for its campaign of True Colors, depicting an aubergine with its tail transformed to a color pencil of the aubergine color.

McDonald’s kept it highly simple in their ad “Wi-Fries”, by arranging fries in the shape of Wi-Fi, sending a clear message that you get free WiFi, using one of their most ordered items, French Fries.

Kit Kat’s “Have a Break” print ad, employed a similar technique in a delightfully creative manner, showing the two pieces of a KitKat placed in the shape of a pause button.

The “neighbors” FedEx ad campaign created by DDB showed a package quickly moving from one place to another, exchanged through the hands of neighbors from their windows, with the world map painted in the background. It blended symbolism perfectly to showcase the brand’s message of quick and efficient delivery.

 Coca Cola Light’s ad for Lemon simply showed a lemon peel curved in the shape of C with the perfect use of colors, making it look refreshing. Minimalistic ad designs have also been executed beautifully by some locally known hidden gems.

Tzomet Sfarim Bookstore of Israel executed a campaign called “Face a book” by modifying the logo of Facebook, urging their audience to disconnect for a while from social media and read a book instead.

An ad by Shin Nori restaurant, telling its visitors that Japanese food is served at 11 AM, showed chopsticks placed in the position of 11 o’clock on a round red plate, symbolizing Japanese food and the color of the Japanese flag.

India, although has a long way to go in finding a mass audience for minimalist advertising. But it has come up with some brilliant examples.

Rajasthan tourism ad of Incredible India captures the essence of the state in a beautiful; manner, telling us to see, however, we feel like, by perfectly placing camels to look like mustaches.

Minimalist video advertising has been excellently done by Apple for their MacBook Air ad which shows Macbook air coming out of a thin envelope with just a message in the ending saying “The world’s thinnest laptop”.

When to go Minimalistic?

Is going Minimalistic always the right approach? Though Twitter revolutionized the micro-blogging, expressing a message in 140- characters sometimes restrain the creativity of the writer. Most social media marketers rely on other apps like Facebook and Instagram along with Twitter to write a little longer description of their post. If an ad has too much blank space, there’s a good chance that people will skip over it because from a distance it is hard to tell what it is. Most minimalistic ads rely on the knowledge of the consumer and expects him to be aware of the allusions they are using. Shin Nori and Tzomet Sfarim Bookstore ads would be irrelevant for a person who doesn’t know the attributes of Japanese flag/food or isn’t engrossed in social media respectively. Such ads cater to a niche audience.

If the symbolism in the ad is too complex and doesn’t engage the maximum crowd, then it would be a drawback.

Minimalist Marketing offers us a refreshing space to breathe in a suffocating world of extravagance and stimulates us to use our perspective. While it continues to enthrall us, amuse us and touch our hearts with its charm, we should remember that it is a gamble. One should go for it only if they trust creativity and simplicity of it and the true value of the message is delivered in a crisp and identifiable manner.