Perhaps that's a question we should all start asking ourselves. The study of "cognitive fluency" is a hot topic in psychology and might soon be one in communications. We can intuitively grasp that, all things being equal, the mind prefers simple information to complex information. What's more surprising is how much simplicity or ease-of-use affects our judgements across all sorts of criteria:
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities... Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for - in short, in any situation where we weigh information.
Or, as an old client of mine was fond of putting it, "if I can't spell it, you won't sell it."
