Every day, you and I and everyone else living in our modern age are faced with a tsunami of information coming at us.

In the marketplace alone, we’re all confronted with a bewildering number of choices to evaluate, often among me-too products and similar services.

The average U.S. supermarket, for example, carries nearly 44,000 items, each one clamoring to be purchased. (Source: Food Marketing Institute, 2013)

How do we cut through all the noise and clutter? One answer is that we use brands.

Brands simplify our lives.

You use brands as shortcuts. We all do. Once you try a brand and like it, you can go on happily buying that same brand without even looking at alternatives.

But brands, by and large, don’t work if they’re complex and difficult to understand. Without a simple, clear, memorable image and promise, a brand will be ignored in the world’s increasingly crowded marketplace.

According to Interbrand, the global brand ranking company, the 15 most valuable brands in 2015 were Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, Toyota, Samsung, GE, McDonald’s, Amazon, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Disney, Intel, and Cisco.

All of these brands are really megabrands, representing huge, incredibly complex companies with many sub-brands. But chances are, you have a simple, clearly defined image in mind for each megabrand, not to mention many of its products or services.

Getting-to-simple simply works.