Oct 30, 2025 | AI, Marketing
For most, the answer to the question in the header would be ‘Yes’, but I am not sure how.
Google has spent 20 years conditioning us to rely on the ‘Last click’ a customer makes in their purchase journey, and monetising the generation of that last click.
Any marketer worth the label knows that there is a range of factors that influence a buying choice that have little to do with the last click.
That way of thinking was always lazy. Now, with AI search answering questions directly and starting a journey that in my view leads to strangling traditional SEO, it’s also muddle-headed.
Economists have two simple tools that expose how broken your attribution really is: the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient. Together, they can connect what is happening right now with SEO, AI answers, and the shift to “Answer Engine Optimisation” (AEO).
The Lorenz Curve is a way to show how unevenly something is shared. Economists use it to show income inequality. We can use it to show attribution inequality.
On the horizontal axis you line up all your marketing touchpoints: brand advertising, brochures, display ads, Google ads, word of mouth, showroom visits, social proof, installer van on the street, and so on. On the vertical axis you show how much “credit for the sale” each touchpoint gets.
If all touchpoints shared credit evenly, the curve would be a perfect diagonal line. That says: every channel mattered equally. When you only count that last click, usually a Google ad, everything else in the marketing mix looks like a rounding error. Reality never looks like that.
When you graph that unrealistic assumption that the last touchpoint is the key, the Lorenz Curve bends sharply down and across instead of sitting near the diagonal. The harder that curve bends, the more you are lying to yourself about what led to the transaction.
Now we give that bend a number.
The Gini Coefficient is a number between 0 and 1 that tells you how unequal the distribution is. Zero means “perfectly even”. One means “one thing took it all”.
A low Gini means you’re spreading credit across the full customer journey. You acknowledge brand, reputation, trust, word of mouth, proof, and follow up.
A high Gini means you are giving credit to one or two digital clicks and pretending everything else did not exist.
Call it your Attribution Gini.
When your Attribution Gini is high, you’re under-investing in the work that actually created demand. You’re starving the slow compounding stuff: reputation, perceived quality, remembered expertise, physical presence, referrals. You are funding only the “closer” at the goal line, and not the team that marched the ball 90 metres up the field.
Think about how people actually buy. A neighbour mentions you. They see your installer van parked in a nice suburb. They see your name in a social media group, hear your name in a casual conversation, or meet you in a group of some sort. When they have a relevant issue, there is some level of ‘mental availability’ built up by these non-attributable mentions. So, they visit your website, and probably those of your competitors, then right at the end, they Google your brand name, click a link, and request a quote. Google dashboards give overweighted attribution to that last step in the process. It’s like giving most of the credit for dinner to the waiter who carried the plate to the table, and none to the farmer, the chef, ambience, or location of the restaurant.
We all know it is nonsense, but it is a nonsense we have accepted because it is easy, relies on numbers which pleases the engineers and accountants who run the place, and we did not have an easy alternative.
Consider the following example, a marketing program with seven touchpoints that appeared in a set of successful sales, with the google allocated sales impact.
- Google Ad (last click). Drove 60% of sales.
- Instagram Ad. Drove 15% of sales
- Email follow-up. Drove 10% of sales
- Website research visits/. Drove 5% of sales
- Brochure as PDF download. Drove 5% of sales
- Brand advertising / PR coverage. Drove 3% of sales
- Word of mouth. Drove 2% of sales.
If you graph that on a Lorenz Curve, you get a big bend, as demonstrated in the header. Then you calculate the Gini Coefficient and it’s high. The google dashboard reports that almost all the credit goes to one channel.
That will never feel right, but to date we have run with it.
The migration of search from the familiar SEO ‘tricks’ that suit the last click environment to single answer responses to longer queries is a profound change. So far, the share of LLM generated queries is a small percentage of total searches, 1-3% depending on the source, but is rising at geometric rates.
Those who are successful in the future will figure out how to ensure their brand is returned when an AI initiated search is done. This requires a rethink of the way questions are asked, and puts far more weight on the communication channels currently largely ignored by the old SEO rules. Google now shows an AI generated “overview” at the top of many searches. Chat-style engines like Perplexity, and AI assistants baked into phones and browsers, give a direct answer and cite a few brands as proof. Users tend not to scroll and browse. They ask, they get told, they decide.
LLM’s gives us the ability to dig deeper into the drivers of attribution that we have ever had. We are moving into the world of ‘Answer Engine Optimisation’. Do not be left behind.
Oct 24, 2025 | Customers, retail
I’ve been marketing to consumers for 50 years. Success seems to become more illusionary every day. The process has become complex beyond the ability of any mortal to fully grasp, yet it is us that have made it so in the search for some ‘differentiator’.
In reality, it is very simple.
The value chain has evolved to a small number of strategic choices that need to be made. After all, there are only two gorillas and a strongly growing chimp between you, the marketer, and them, the consumer.
It is the complexity of the available tactical choices that consume most of the time, energy, and money.
My advice is to step back and consider the few factors that will make a real difference and save the money on the rest. Recognise the things you can control and control them. Acknowledge the things you cannot control and prepare for both surprises and disappointments.
Weight of distribution.
Supermarkets control the point of consumer purchase. Your task is to generate as much weight of distribution as you can for a given investment. It doesn’t matter how great the ad might be, how many ‘influencers’ you might employ, and how many channels you pay for the messages to be carried, if it’s not on shelf a consumer cannot buy it.
Consider your WOD in two dimensions: depth and breadth, and never compromise breadth for depth. 100% weight of distribution in Sydney only will always be better than 50% in NSW. It is not just the number of potential customers you may reach, but the availability when they are in a store, pushing a trolley, that counts
Consumers do not care.
The consumer is not interested in your beautifully crafted brand strategy, the sales deck you recite to the buyers, or the research that tells you the new pack design will clean up in the market. They simply do not care.
Consumers are just looking for the product that solves the problem, delivers a desired outcome. Yours will be one of many products claiming to deliver value, in which case yours must solve the problem better than any alternative in some way, on the day the consumer is in front of the shelf, contemplating a purchase.
Brand awareness is a red herring.
Having high brand awareness is useless unless it is relevant. Everybody is aware of Coca Cola, but not everybody is in the market for Coca Cola when they are in a supermarket. What is important is that when a consumer is in the market for a particular type of product, yours is the one that comes to mind that is most relevant to the current situation. Academics call it ‘mental availability’. What it really means is that when that illusionary consumer is contemplating buying a tub of margarine, a bottle of hot sauce, a box of washing powder, or a soft drink, your brand is the one that jumps to the front of their mind as the best option.
Focus kills wide frontal.
Focus trumps general every time. Spreading your marketing budget across multiple channels and many types of content might feel good but it is a waste of most of the money. Understanding your customer well enough to focus your resources to generate that vital mental availability in the right context is far more efficient.
It is the difference between the trench warfare of the western front, and the blitzkrieg in the identical locations a generation later.
Social proof.
Word of mouth has always been, and will always be, the most powerful form of marketing. People trust other people, particularly people they know (sometimes knowing works in the opposite direction) much more than they trust any form of paid communication. The conversation over the back fence will convert to a purchase much more often than a glossy ad. It takes longer, it takes patience, and a solid strategy, but it ‘sticks’. Robert Cialdini coined the term Social Proof 45 years ago. It is now more critical to success that it has ever been, living as we do in a world suffering from a tsunami off AI generated slop. genuine social proof is where the marketing gold lies hidden.
Get those five things right, and you will have a good chance of winning. Four out of five, and you are on borrowed time.
Oct 16, 2025 | Leadership, Strategy
On the surface there is little in common between these two manufacturing inputs. However, there are two commonalities
First: Australia has plenty of both in its raw form
Second: Australia currently and into the future has little or no chance of being a significant supplier of the end value added product.
Australia remains a significant contributor to the world’s supply of raw wool. In volume we are now second behind China. In value we are the runaway leader after 100 years of genetic management leading to a fine and consistent wool staple, ideal for the manufacturing of high-end clothing. We do only a tiny, artisan level of processing of the raw wool in this country. Over time we have outsourced this dirty, effluent heavy process to India and China.
Sadly, the huge value add to wool occurs after the initial processing of the raw clip, and we are not getting any of it, beyond a few scraps.
In the case of rare earth minerals, we have plenty in the ground, very little of which is being mined currently, and very little of what is mined is processed.
These science fiction sounding minerals occur at very low concentrations, requiring hundreds if not thousands of tonnes of earth being mined and processed to deliver very small amounts of the final product. The subsequent processing is capital intensive, uses toxic chemicals, consumes vast amounts of water and energy, and for neodymium in particular, the critical component of high performance magnets, emits vast amounts of CO2 during processisng. . As a result, we have the raw material, but no way to add the value.
China has a stranglehold on the world supply of these minerals, controlling around 90% of processing and around 70% of the volume of mined material for subsequent processing. Over 20 years China has invested heavily in generating this chokehold on the critical inputs to a modern economy. 20 years start gives them immense price and availability leverage over the industrial activity of the rest of the world, which increasingly requires those science fiction sounding rare earth elements in the manufacture of a vast range of products.
In recent days China has changed the rules on the mining, processessing and export of products made with rare earth elements. The technology required to process the raw materials, and the manufacturing technologies necessary to produce end products are now all subject to licenses being given by the Chinese government. If nothing else, this should scare the wits out of the loonies in the White House.
While building a lather abour rare earch minerals, we should aslo remember the dominence China now has in minerals that are not classed as ‘rare earth’. Managnese, Cobolt, Graphite, lithium, and others.
It would be a brave man to predict any change in this situation in anything less than decades, hundreds of billions invested, and really politically sensative choices being made about the environmental impacts that expansion of non Chinese supply would entail.
The Australian government has announced a ‘Critical minerals strategy’ that includes a Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve. This all sounds appealing, but the acid test will come the first time a mining enterprise proposes to mine an area that is the last habatat of some rare insect, and add CO2 to the atmosphere by establishing a pilot processing plant. The last time the government got involved with supply chain management of a raw material with a view to controlling price and availability was with the wool industry. That ended up as an absolute disaster, and would be logarithnically easier to get right than it will be to bridge the gap with rare earth minerals..
A ‘Critical Minerals Strategy’ sounds like a good idea, is a better sound bite, but is a practical hurdle of enormous proportions. However, China’s dominence should be seen as a challenge to be met with application of the pool of scientific and mining intellect we have in this country. We must find a pathway to making the existing lead China enjoys redundant by the generation and application of scientific understanding, and subsequent development of the technology.to process the stuff in an environmentally sustainable manner.
Oct 13, 2025 | Change, Innovation, Leadership
If everyone in the room agrees, you are probably all wrong. Innovation does not come from consensus; it comes from the friction created by different ideas and perspectives.
If you listen to comedians, there is a common thread through everything they say. A friend of mine who does a bit of fun standup calls it the ‘1,2,5’ of conversation. The first statement sets the scene, the second reinforces the first, the next is entirely unexpected. It is not the obvious ‘3’, rather, it is oblique, often the opposite, and always a surprise. The laugh, or in my friends case, occasional quiet chuckle, comes from that unexpected punchline.
Consider the survival chances in a hostile environment of two groups of people.
One is a homogenous group, that automatically sees things in a similar way.
The second is a neurologically diverse group that sees things from different perspectives.
Which is the more likely to survive that hostile environment?
This leads to the obvious but often ignored idea that the way you make up the groups in your business requires some heretics, comedians, and philosophers.
Rather than randomly allocating people to a group tasked to undertake a specific challenge, would it not be better to ensure you have a neurologically diverse group undertake it, as they are way more likely to surface new, different ideas. Some of those ideas, even most, may be absolute crap, but it just takes one to deliver the idea that changes everything.
Nicholas Copernicus presented the idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe, using Galileo’s newly invented telescope. This led to him being excommunicated for heresy by the Catholic church. Later, he was proved right, which did not help him. In time however, it helped the rest of us as it completely changed the way we think.
Every new idea starts as a heresy noted 19th century philosopher Thomas Huxley.
If you want these ideas that are often extremely inconvenient, to emerge from your group, you need to work for them.
Header: The eyepiece of Galileo’s telescope
Oct 8, 2025 | Analytics, Leadership, Operations
We have learned over time, led by Toyota, that ‘root cause analysis’ thereby seeing the root cause of problems is the road to continuous improvement.
At any time when there is a problem, do not let it get papered over, do not let the symptoms be treated, dig and dig until you understand the root cause and then fix it.
Often this is a challenging task, root causes by their nature are usually well hidden, and often ambiguous until there is a forensic examination. However, they are always there and rooting them out enables a compounding of improvements over time.
That analysis requires a cultural context in which to work, as it takes time, consumes resources, and is never completed, as there is always another problem to be analysed. That is the nature of problems, root out one bottleneck, and the blockage just moves to the next spot, previously hidden by the former one.
However, we also seem to look at a process from its beginning, setting out to define a hidden problem occurring inside the process.
Should we reverse the order, and look at the causes of success?
Why and how has Toyota managed to remake themselves from the crappy stuff carrying the lousy quality implications of ‘made in Japan’ from my childhood to an icon of quality, and in the process, driven change through manufacturing globally?
What is the root cause of their success?
My contention is that the root cause is a simple piece of rope.
The Andon cord.
Toyota put Andon cords through their factories, so that any person on the line could stop the line at any time when they saw a fault.
Not only were they empowered to stop the line, they were expected to do so any time a problem occurred that could not be fixed in the time allowed at that station in the line. When the line was stopped by a worker, the supervisor immediately went to the stoppage point with two objectives:
- Solve the problem to ensure it would not be repeated, and that the problem got not one step closer to a customer.
- To congratulate the worker for stopping the line so the problem could be fixed. This ensured there was not any reluctance to address a problem by such radical means as stopping a whole factory.
This is an extreme example of empowering the front line, making those who can see problems as they face them all the time, responsible for fixing them.
When introduced, this must have caused headaches, as the productivity would have plummeted. The number of cars produced dropped off a cliff, but those that got through would be as good as they could be, and slowly, as problems were solved, productivity rose, quality rose, as over time Toyota became the benchmark for motor vehicle quality around the world.
All from a simple piece of rope, and the surrounding culture that delivered to those at the coal face, the responsibility to exercise their right to pull it.
What is the equivalent of the Toyota Andon cord in your business?
