Verizon is making a noticeable change in how it packages its wireless services.
In June, the company introduced simpler plans, eliminated activation and upgrade fees, and announced new loyalty benefits designed to make the relationship with Verizon easier to understand.
Its new “Simplicity” plan also removes network tiers, while another offering combines Mobility and Home on a single bill with taxes and fees included.
Verizon implemented these updates as a way to compete for customers in a very crowded U.S. wireless market.
While many people may see this as a simple pricing structure update, I see it a little differently.
Wireless customers have spent years navigating complicated combinations of plans, fees, device payments, promotions, bundles, and eligibility requirements.
So when a company starts removing some of that complexity, it’s changing more than the offer. The new “simplicity” fundamentally changes how customers experience the brand itself.
And I see that as an important distinction for brands in any category or industry.
Simplicity is often treated as a communications or design challenge.
But in all my years at Starfish, I’ve learned it should really be baked into the decisions a company makes very early on, including:
- What the brand sells
- How it prices its products and services
- How customers access its products and services
- What happens when something goes wrong
In this case, telecom is a particularly useful example because complexity has historically been deeply embedded in the category.
Plans, device financing, upgrades, bundles, fees, promotions, and eligibility rules can all create friction.
And Verizon’s moves show what happens when simplicity starts moving upstream.
Build Simplicity Into The Experience
The easiest way for a brand to misunderstand simplicity is to treat it as something that happens at the end of the process.
But real simplicity starts much earlier, well before a potential customer even sees an ad.
At its core, simplicity is an operations decision. It shows up in pricing structures, contracts, onboarding, billing, upgrades, and support before it shows up in any campaign.
That is why Verizon’s announcement is interesting from a brand experience perspective.
The company isn’t just saying that its plans are easier to understand. It’s changing some of the underlying sources of friction:
- Eliminating activation and upgrade fees removes decisions and potential surprises from the customer journey.
- Combining Mobility and Home onto one bill reduces the number of places a customer has to look to understand the relationship.
- Refining the loyalty program adds another layer of value to the ongoing customer relationship.
These are clearly operational choices. But more importantly, customers experience these decisions as a reflection of your brand’s image and values.
After all, they won’t necessarily know you decided to add a fee or restructure a plan. All they know is simply what experience they had when they interacted with a company.
That’s why the strongest simplicity strategies don’t ask, “How can we explain this more clearly?”
Rather, they should start by asking, “Why does the customer have to figure this out at all?”
Answering that question is when simplicity becomes a genuine brand strategy rather than a design treatment.
Make Simplicity Legible To AI
There is another reason simplicity is becoming more important. Brands now have to be understood by both people and AI systems.
I think of this as machine legibility.
When a person asks an AI assistant to explain a company's offering or compare it with alternatives, the system has to interpret the brand's proposition and translate it into an answer.
The clearer the underlying proposition, the easier that becomes.
Complexity creates problems here for much the same reason it creates problems for people.
If an offer requires several qualifications, exceptions, pricing conditions, eligibility rules, or distinctions between similar products, some of that complexity may be difficult to communicate in a concise AI-generated response.
But this doesn’t mean I think brands should overcorrect and simplify everything for machines.
Teams must recognize that clarity has become part of how brands are represented in a world where customers increasingly use AI to research products, compare options, and make decisions.
The best way to test whether your simplicity strategy is on-point would be to ask one simple question.
Can a customer, a frontline employee and an AI assistant describe the offer in the same sentence?
If the answer is “no,” then your strategy is too focused on cosmetic fixes.
This is where the human world and the AI world begin to intersect.
After all, the goal here isn’t to design a brand around AI or reduce every proposition to something machines can process.
The goal of simplicity to make sure the underlying idea is clear enough to remain recognizable wherever the brand is encountered.
Make Simplicity A Business Discipline
Simplicity should not become another campaign theme that appears in advertising and disappears when the customer reaches the next stage of the journey.
The more useful approach is to make it a business discipline.
That starts by identifying where the organization creates unnecessary friction:
- Which policies make an experience harder than it needs to be?
- Which fees create confusion?
- Which product structures force customers to make unnecessary choices?
- Where do employees need to translate the company's own proposition before they can explain it?
Those questions usually aren’t treated as brand questions.
But they should be.
