Reduce and Reorient for Kick-Ass Content

During his senior year in high school, Rick Rubin founded Def Jam records. What did you do your senior year in high school?

In the 40 years since, Rubin has produced the era’s most consequential recording artists and albums across genres, from The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy to Metallica, Slayer, The Strokes, Johnny Cash…and the list goes on.

What all these bands seek, and what Rubin brings to the relationships, is the truth. He breaks the band down to its pure, core, essential elements and sound, and doesn’t let production or what Bob Dylan would call filigree obstruct or distract from the truth the band or artist is trying to convey.  

In his new book, Rubin explains his approach thusly, “I’m not a producer, I’m a reducer.”

Rubin embodies Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s philosophy on design: “Perfection is finally attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. When a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”

In that spirit, the majority of SaaS product marketers and product managers have a lot to learn from the Rubin / Saint-Exupery approach to the design, development, and promotion of their products. 

When the instinct arises to over-explain or over-produce it reveals a masking of perceived inefficiencies in the product or the strategy. If your copy is heavy on adjectives and compound modifiers you are likely trying too hard, and the audience picks up on that.

Which is why this campaign from Staedtler is so astute. 

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The sleight of hand that makes this so poignant and effective (besides the perfect yin/yang of copy and art direction) is in how it sees the opportunity through the customer outcome and not the product feature/benefits. “We help you get to the point.” 

I’m reminded of a David Hockney quote in his new book that neatly captures the re-orientation: “It is not the place that is intrinsically interesting, it is the person looking at it.”

Replace “place” and “looking” with “product” and “using” and you have the foundation for a content strategy that is compelling to the target audience.  

Through reduction and re-orientation, the story you tell and sell about your company gains power through differentiation and removes you from the "better" game indicated by over-wrought and over-produced copy and production.

-DRMG