The difficulty of complex messages

What on earth is this Higgs Boson thing about? I've watched a video, I've looked it up on Wikipedia, I've read a news article...and I still don't really know. But then again, I'm not a scientist - perhaps I'm not the target market and don't really need to know?

And it made me think about marketing messages - what can you do, as a marketer, if the message you have for your target market, or the product/service you are selling, is really rather complex? Can you sell something if you don't understand it? And if you do understand it, can you develop key messages in a simple way that won't be seen as 'dumbing down'? It can be so difficult to avoid jargon - the language you use internally to talk about what you do and what you sell might not be appropriate or clear externally.

All of this came together for me in a great blog post I saw in The Telegraph, calling for people to attempt to explain Higgs Boson in a tweet. Never before has the 140 character restriction been such a challenge! (Or is this my take on it, because - essentially - I still don't get it?!)

Judging the book industry by the covers

Everyone in my office is reading it. All of my friends are reading it. Many of my friends' mothers are reading it. Yes, you guessed it - Fifty Shades of Grey. It's the first book to sell more than a million copies on Kindle and is the fastest selling paperback since records began. I'm not here to discuss the contents of the book - or the observation by some that it's not very well written - but the marketing of it (of course!)

Jon Wood, deputy publisher at Orion, said: "No one saw this coming. The world has changed. The book market does that. No one really saw Stieg Larsson coming. No one saw Dan Brown coming either. That’s the beauty of this industry. I don’t know if it’s here to stay but the scale of sales would imply that this will last at least a little bit of time"

This makes me wonder - why is the world of publishing so reactive? How come no one saw all these amazing books coming? Surely it's the job of marketing to keep their fingers on the pulse of public opinion and taste, to try and predict the trends in order to preempt the wishes of the consumer? I heard that Fifty Shades began life as a twilight fan blog, which gained popularity and just exploded.

And now, of course, the bandwagon is a-rollin'. Publishers are rooting around their back catalogue to see what they have that could fit this trend, to try and piggy back the so-called 'mummy porn' genre (I hate that expression with a passion. A burning passion. Even worse than 'chick lit'!) The worst offender I've heard of, is Mills and Boon releasing a series of books called '12 shades of surrender'. Seriously?!! This amounts, in my eyes, to Ambush Marketing - and I'm not a fan. It pangs of a lack of creativity and laziness really.

So I guess my question is - where next? Is the book market so massively consumer led and unpredictable? Where will ePublishing take the industry in, say, 3 years? A fascinating and exciting landscape - would love to hear your thoughts!