Nov 10, 2025 | AI
AI has been labelled many things from a fundamental driver of change to just another technology.
People say AI kills jobs and creativity. That’s lazy thinking. The real risk is comfort—the reflex to cling to old silos and familiar workflows while the world moves on, and competitors build better systems.
Organisational silos evolved to manage scale.
AI has given us an alternative that is quicker, better, and cheaper, but requires a revision of the way we think about the tasks that face us. The silos of yesterday must be destroyed.
The biggest threat is resistance to change, a reluctance to embrace the huge productivity gains that AI has made possible. We become too comfortable to work at leveraging the available benefits of embracing the tech.
The leadership task is to leverage the capabilities of AI to become a catalyst for organisational and cultural change.
Rather than thinking about our jobs in functional silos we should be considering the potential to broaden our capacity to think and create new value at every point in the job process, leveraging the time freed up by AI to enhance the scope of the job itself. This applies to every job at every level in an organisation
Completing tasks quicker is the dimension that attracts most attention.
Expanding the scope and importance of the tasks done is at least as important, and I would argue, are where the real productivity benefits beyond costs as currently defined in a P&L hide.
We risk becoming less conscientious, less determined to get the facts straight when they are delivered to our inbox, all packaged up. This is a danger, as it erodes the capacity for creativity and critical thinking. However, being aware of a risk is 90% of being able to set boundaries and manage it.
AI can deliver momentum. Simple, repetitive tasks can be automated, leaving time and headspace for the stuff that builds ‘flow’. This is the state from which the most valuable outcomes always emerge. Ignoring the potential for AI to deliver momentum will see your competition race past you.
Use AI to smash those organisational silos and deliver the benefits.
Nov 6, 2025 | AI, Marketing, Uncategorized
Marketing loves a revolution, preferably one with fireworks, a celebrity CMO, and a paid Gartner report showing a hockey stick. Every new technology arrives promising to rewrite the laws of business.
Meanwhile, the laws never change.
Newton had it right centuries ago: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Marketing keeps proving him right. The faster we chase shiny new digital tactics, the harder the pendulum swings back to the fundamentals we pretended we no longer needed.
The Hype Machine vs. Reality
AI evangelists shout that everything has changed. They’re half‑right. The tools have changed. The speed has changed. The expectation of real‑time response has changed.
But the bedrock?
Know your customer, serve them relentlessly, and build trust you don’t squander.
Peter Drucker’s reminder rings louder than ever: The purpose of marketing is to create a customer.
That was true before AI, it will be true long after whatever replaces AI evolves.
Newton’s First Law: Brands That Stay in Motion… Stay in Motion
A brand with momentum earns attention even when the tools shift. Strong positioning and consistent storytelling generate their own gravity.
Campaigns used to last years. Now we rotate creative at the speed of TikTok. But the brands that last, the ones that compound mental availability play the long game.
Eyeballs come from activation.
Profit comes from brand.
The long term enables the short term. Always has, always will.
Newton’s Second Law: Force = Mass x Acceleration
Digital acceleration gives marketers more force: faster cycle times, instant metrics, and dashboards that look scientific.
The result?
Everyone is reacting. No one is thinking creatively from first principles, and trust is the casualty.
Trust is earned by performance as promised — repeatedly, and can be lost in one failed moment. That hasn’t changed since merchants first haggled in a marketplace.
Newton’s Third Law: Every Action Sparks a Reaction
The more we optimise for clicks, the more customers lose patience.
The more noise we make, the more deaf they become.
This is why brand building matters more today than ever, not less.
It gives people a reason to care before you give them a reason to click.
The fact that it is much harder to build a successful brand today amongst the tsunami of competition for attention makes success more rewarding when it is achieved.
Proof From the Pub
Advertising platforms come and go. Positioning endures.
Remember the Tooheys ads from the early eighties? “I feel like a Tooheys.” A social beer for a social moment. That construct worked because it tapped into a universal truth: reward, mateship, the end‑of‑day ritual.
Three decades later, after a long hiatus, the idea and variation on the 40 year old execution still works. The brand physics didn’t change. The accountants who inherited the brand 30 years ago did not know these basic laws of market positioning. However, it seems a marketer is back in the drivers seat, as the positioning is being renewed.
The Only Trend That Never Ends
Every marketer faces the same trade‑off: harvest now, or plant for later.
Short‑term activation makes the CFO smile.
Long‑term brand keeps the organisation alive.
Ignore the fundamentals and you may win the sprint, but keep them central and you’ll win the marathon.
The more things change in marketing, the more they stay the same.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
A Final Thought
If you want to avoid being whiplashed by every new tactic dressed up as a strategy, bring someone to the table who has lived through enough hype cycles to recognise what actually moves the needle.
A wise old head. With battle scars. Who knows where the shortcuts lead — and where the traps are hidden.
Give me a call before you change everything… and accidentally change nothing for the better.
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.
