Sep 28, 2026 | Branding, Marketing
A workshop with idle machines needs a different management and marketing tactic from one that cannot reliably deliver the work it has already sold.
Yet the pro forma solution from many ‘digital marketing gurus’ would be to ‘generate more leads.’ For one, it may be sensible advice, for the other, totally wrong.
The same business can move from the first situation to the second in the blink of an eye. The advice that helped fill the order book can then make the delivery problem worse.
Good marketing advice carries small print, ‘be sceptical, trust your instincts, and understand all the numbers’. The ‘numbers’ always includes the elusive, hard to measure factors that are often the game-changers.
We make grand assumptions constantly. An impressive case study becomes a conference presentation, then a rule that everyone should follow. Somewhere along the way, we lose sight of the buying cycle, the available resources, and the particular customer problem the business set out to solve.
Consider the instruction to concentrate on retaining customers because keeping one costs less than finding a new one. Usually this is very good advice.
For a subscription business losing customers through poor service, understanding why customers are not renewing would usually be better. Spending more on acquisition while customers leave in frustration just gives the service department a larger queue of complaints that leads to further erosion.
However, a roofing contractor cannot persuade a satisfied homeowner to need another roof next year. The relationship still matters for referrals and reputation, but growth requires access to other people who need a roof. A retention campaign that ignores the purchase cycle solves a problem the business does not have.
Even where customers buy regularly, the economics deserve scrutiny.
A discount to someone who would have bought at the normal price reduces margin without changing behaviour. Retention only creates additional value when your action changes an outcome worth changing. The constant promotional pressure exerted by supermarkets on suppliers has served only to erode supplier margins and destroy brands.
Then there is the instruction to put more money into the marketing activity that delivers the best measurable return. Sensible enough, provided you understand what the measurement tells you, and it is a useful addition to your understanding of customer behaviour.
A customer may hear about you from a colleague, read your material, and later search for your business by name. The final enquiry tells you where they entered the sales process. It does not, by itself, explain what persuaded them to look for you.
Move all your money towards the activity that collects the enquiries, and you risk starving the activities that created the interest. You can improve the reported efficiency of your marketing while weakening its ability to generate future demand.
That does not give anyone permission to hide poor performance behind the words “brand building.” It means you need evidence that suits the decision, and a measurement period that respects the buying cycle.
The common mistake in these examples is accepting the prescription before diagnosing the problem.
More leads assume you can profitably serve more customers. Retention assumes you can influence another purchase or prevent a worthwhile customer from leaving. Increasing a marketing budget assumes the next dollar will create enough additional value to justify its cost.
Write down the assumption before you approve the activity, and then ask what evidence would show you that it no longer holds.
“It depends” offers no help unless you can explain what it depends on, and how that changes the decision.
Nor should we use context as an excuse to discard experience whenever a fashionable idea comes along. Understanding the customer, keeping promises, and earning an adequate margin remain essential to success. The tactics we use to achieve them needs more frequent examination.
The practical question is what constrains profitable growth here, now. A shortage of suitable buyers requires a different response from poor conversion, inadequate capacity, or a service failure.
Before accepting the next piece of marketing advice, ask: “What would have to be true for this to work in my business?”
If the adviser cannot answer that, a larger font on the presentation will not help.
The character of Don Draper in ‘Madmen’ depicted in the header probably said it best.
Aug 31, 2026 | Branding, Customers, Strategy
Marketers, particularly those that emerged after the sudden take-over of marketing by digital platforms, love fireworks.
They talk about big creative ideas, reach, frequency, ideal customers and their profiles, attention and campaigns that become part of popular culture. Meadow Lea had all of that.
It also had a folding table, a loaf of sliced white bread and a woman who knew the product intimately.
That ordinary little table may have mattered just as much as all the hoopla.
In a market full of near-identical products, recognition earns familiarity, then the product feels like an old friend. This reduces mental effort and perceived risk.
Trust comes later.
Advertising can make a promise. Only performance can prove it.
Digital technology has made it easier than ever to start a business. A template, a payment gateway a social media advertising account, and a contract manufacturer can put you into the market by lunchtime.
It has also made it easier than ever to look exactly like everyone else.
Low barriers to entry enabled by digital tools and extended and readily available supply chains creates the opportunity for low-cost product imitation. The ‘noise’ generated by the presence of imitators drowns out anything but highly creative and distinctive brand building effort. This requires consistency, discipline, and a sequence of promise, proof, repetition, and memory to be delivered to consumers.
Advertising makes the promise. The product and the people provide the proof. Repetition turns that proof into an expectation, and the expectation when met consistently becomes trust.
Meadow Lea offers one of Australia’s great examples.
In 1975 I was a newly minted product manager at what later became Meadow Lea Foods. Mojo created the great “You oughta be congratulated” ads that turbo charged Meadow Lea’s market share from single figures in a highly contested and commodified market to around 23% of volume, and a greater share of value and profit.
That long running campaign did more than advertise a brand of margarine. It spoke directly to mothers at a time when more women were entering paid work while still carrying most of the domestic load. Rather than reminding them of another obligation, Meadow Lea congratulated them for what they already did.
The advertising gave the brand real meaning to those in charge of the purchase decision. National distribution made it easy to buy, and product quality kept the promise.
Then the program of supermarket demonstrations made the promise personal.
We selected and trained a small team of demonstrators in each state and kept them working in stores for 40 weeks of the year. They did not simply hand out pieces of bread, or dry biscuit with a smear of margarine on them. They answered questions, explained the product, listened to shoppers, and offered an immediate, risk-free trial.
Nobody entered a supermarket craving a square of white bread covered in margarine. That was only the conversation starter, a small piece of empathy delivered by somebody who understood the challenges being faced in a busy and fractured life that seemed to be changing daily.
The advertising said the brand understood its buyers. The demonstrator behaved as though it did. The first bite turned an abstract promise into evidence, by delivering the pat on the back the advertising promised.
Each demonstration closed a small part of the gap between what Meadow Lea said and what shoppers believed.
Most contemporary marketing teams would call the program difficult to scale. Many finance teams would call it labour intensive, tough to manage, open to shenanigans, and to the sales teams that carried the responsibility of organising the logistics, it was another task to be completed.
All were right, but they also missed the point.
The program worked because we repeated it. Week after week. Store after store. Conversation after conversation.
Someone had to recruit the demonstrators, train them, roster them, supply them and maintain the standard. Nobody won an advertising award for any of that. It was however a key to the work of building the foundations of the Meadow Lea brand.
Many businesses now reverse the sequence. They spend heavily making a promise, then leave the proof to an overloaded receptionist, an unanswered email, a poorly informed salesperson, or a late delivery.
Nothing destroys expensive advertising faster than cheap execution.
A brand operates like a trust account. Marketing opens it, but every customer experience either makes a deposit or a withdrawal.
One supermarket sample did not build Meadow Lea. Thousands of consistent conversations helped do it.
The jingle earned attention, the product tasting, evidence that the brand did what it said, earned belief.
Attention can make you famous.
Repeated proof or performance, and empathy with the key buyers builds trust, which creates a resilient brand.
Feb 26, 2026 | Branding, Customers
The supermarket shelf has become a monument to creative timidity. Blame the retailers if you like, they certainly deserve some of it. As public corporations laser-focused on financial returns, they prize predictability and incremental volume over anything that might actually take a risk and possibly surprise a consumer.
Their overheads are enormous, their tolerance for risk minimal, and their enthusiasm for the genuinely new essentially theoretical. But suppliers and their so-called marketers have been equally complicit, and strategically gutless, offering up range extensions dressed as innovation and apparently hoping nobody notices.
They haven’t.
The result is aisle after aisle of house brands and proprietary products that are distinguished from each other by the typeface on the label, the colour, or pack size.
I’ve been around long enough to have watched this pattern repeat itself with depressing regularity. And the lesson that emerges, without an exception I have seen, is that the products which truly succeed don’t just occupy a shelf position.
They create a category that didn’t previously exist.
Not a new flavour. Not a reformulation. A new reason for a consumer to reach for their wallet in a way they never had before.
Finding that gap has always felt harder than it actually is. It felt that way fifty years ago when I created my first genuinely new product: a mix of broken olive pieces and pimento in a lightly spiced brine, launched under the Oliveholme brand into a market that barely knew what an olive was. The gap was real, the timing was right, and the product acted as a catalyst for the explosion of ‘continental’ products that followed.
Steve Jobs noted that you can always identify the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. He was right. What he might also have noted is that for every pioneer who took the arrows, three more held back in the tree line and watched someone else make the same journey first, and make a fortune doing it.
The muesli bar story is the one that still stings.
Working at Cerebos forty years ago, we had Cerola muesli and a clear gap in the market: there was no convenient, portable breakfast option. We developed the concept of what we now know as the muesli bar, ran the formulation work, did the factory trials, and built the financial model. I pushed the sales forecast as hard as I felt I responsibly could. As it turned out, it wasn’t hard enough, and the project was shelved. Twelve months later, Uncle Toby’s launched their muesli bar and sold in the first month what I had projected for an entire year. A category was born, and Cerebos was watching from the sideline.
The Light and Crunchy story is a different kind of cautionary tale. We test marketed a cereal product in South Australia designed to fill the then gap between muesli and the two dominating products, Corn Flakes and Wheat Bix. The initial results were very strong, and we congratulated ourselves thoroughly, while planning a national rollout. Then Kellogg’s appeared over the hill with ‘Just Right’, backed by promotional firepower designed to make clear this was their patch and trespassers would be dealt with. Light and Crunchy died on the test bed. Just Right remains on the market, a small but valuable Kelloggs sub-brand. At least I got the strategy right, while dramatically underestimating the competitive response.
Then there was the pasta sauce. Cerebos had the Fountain brand, then dominant in tomato and flavoured sauces. Australians were eating increasing but still small amounts of pasta and making their own sauce. It was a category gap so obvious it almost announced itself. We test marketed in Victoria, managed to fumble the distribution timing and the support package, and watched the whole thing unravel for reasons entirely unrelated to the product itself. A year later, Masterfoods launched Alora — later renamed Dolmio, and created a category worth tens of millions.
The pattern in all three stories is the same, and it isn’t subtle.
Category creation is where the real money lives. Not in the incremental, not in the safe, and certainly not in the fourth variant of an existing product line.
Seeing the future is no easier today than it was fifty years ago. If anything, it’s marginally harder with more people are looking at the same trends, applying the same tools, drawing similar conclusions. But the fundamentals haven’t changed.
You need foresight, yes, but you also need the courage to act on it with aggression and conviction rather than retreating into caution the moment a spreadsheet looks uncertain. Deep pockets help. A tolerance for failure is non-negotiable. Most ideas will founder somewhere along the path — before launch or after — for reasons that range from the predictable to the profoundly unfair.
But the search must continue. Stop looking, and the retailer’s private label will eventually occupy almost all the shelf space, and the shelves will evolve into a grey monotone of sameness.
Consumer boredom is patient and unnoticed, but waiting to be tapped. The retailer’s distribution chokehold drives their margin calculations. They are not patient, are continuingly demanding and risk averse, except when it is not them taking the risk.
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Jan 8, 2026 | Branding, Customers
Woolies and Coles are actively decreasing the number of proprietary brands on shelf in favour of house brands. The standard explanation for this is that they are intent on capturing the manufacturing and brand margin from proprietary brands.
This is true, however perhaps unwittingly there is a psychological benefit they are tapping into.
British psychologist William Hick observed in the 1950s that ‘ the complexity of a decision increases in proportion to the number of available alternatives’
How often have you stood in front of a supermarket shelf with numerous options to choose from, and felt some level of confusion at the choice to be made, and occasionally walked away empty handed?
While price is always noted as the reason Aldi has been so successful, I speculate that the absence of choice plays a significant and under-recognised role.
Similarly, flicking through the many options offered by Netflix, you end up re watching something you have seen before as an alternative to making a choice of something new.
This is Hicks Law in operation.
A short while ago I dined at a upmarket restaurant with I few close friends. We had a choice. A degustation menu with matched wines, or an a la carte menu requiring choices to be made from an extensive list of delicious sounding dishes. We all chose the degustation menu, it was for us a single choice, that removed the ‘stress’ of making a series of choices, all of which were difficult.
Similarly a workshop intending to identify creative solutions to an ill-defined problem, and lacking clear guidelines will always fail.
Hicks law again. The absence of choice makes decisions simpler.
When designing marketing programmes when you have a very good picture of the outcome you want, it makes sense to provide the target of your programme with clarity which will stand out amongst the chaos of alternative offers.
Why do you think the logos for Apple, Qantas, and Nike work so well?
Their simplicity leads to instant ‘mental availability’ of the brand when a potential customer is considering the type of service provided.
Nov 13, 2025 | Branding, Marketing
Most of what passes for innovation in FMCG is little more than range extension wrapped in a new label. Retailers dominate, chasing predictability, risk aversion and quarterly returns. Success is measured by volume and incremental margin gains, much of which is sourced from suppliers.
Much of the blame for being ‘boring’ comes from the supplier base who are simply giving their customers what they demand, failing to see the trap of ‘short-termism’ foised on them. They confuse safety and compliance for strategy. The result over time has been supermarket shelves groaning under the weight of house brands and endless near-identical products.
Real innovation has vanished.
After decades in the trenches, one truth stands out: the products that change markets don’t just add SKUs, they create new categories.
Every memorable FMCG success I can think of didn’t simply introduce something new. It carved out a new space in the shopper’s mind, and on retailers shelves.
That’s not luck. It’s vision, timing, and courage.
Steve Jobs said you can always spot the pioneers, they are the ones with arrows in their backs.
He was right.
If he’d looked at FMCG, he’d have seen that most companies never leave the safety of camp. They mistake caution for wisdom, and substitute another range extension for innovation.
Forty years ago at Cerebos, we had a shot at a game-changer — the first muesli bar. We had everything: the brand, the manufacturing muscle, and the shelf space. We even had the forecast that showed it would work. What we lacked was courage. My sales forecasts for a completely unknown product that was a category creator were way too conservative, failing to reach the Cerebos ROI hurdles, so the project was shelved. A year later Uncle Toby’s launched, and sold a year of my sales forecasts in a month, and created a new category. Our caution cost us the market.
Not long after we test marketed a cereal product we called ‘Light and Crunchy’ in South Australia, again under the Cerola brand. We did not make the same mistake we made with Meusli bars, we made a different one. We badly underestimated the reaction of Kelloggs to an incursion into their patch. They launched a copy-cat product, ‘Just right’ with an ad spend and promotional backing we could not match, so got blown away.
Licking our wounds, we test marketed in Victoria the first pasta sauce into the market. We had the Fountain brand, dominant in tomato and flavoured sauces, Australians were consuming increasing amounts of pasta, but making the sauce themselves. It seemed like a great category generation opportunity. The test failed, for another reason: we bungled the timing of the distribution and modest support package that had been allocated by a sceptical and risk averse MD. A year later, Masterfoods came out with ‘Alora’ pasta sauce since renamed ‘Dolmio’, and created a category.
The pattern is always the same: the timid wait for proof, the bold create it.
If you want to win in FMCG, create a category. That takes foresight, guts, and money, always more than you think.
But it also takes strategic clarity and the commitment to choose and argue strongly for a different future that is not an extension of the present.
There are many more stories of relevance in my long history, all of which contain lessons, for those who choose to look for them.
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Aug 22, 2025 | Analytics, Branding, Marketing, Uncategorized
The Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule with variation in the numbers, works in every situation I have ever seen.
Almost.
It is the exception that makes the rule.
Marketers use it extensively to allocate marketing budgets across competing arenas. Define your ideal customer, understand purchase cycles and habits, recognise different behaviours in different channels and circumstances, and allocate accordingly.
It always seemed to both make sense and work well.
Until it did not.
Research done by Andrew Ehrenberg, Gerald Goodhardt, and Chris Chatfield in 1984 produced a statistical model called the ‘Dirichlet Model‘. It is a statistical reflection of how consumers actually behave across FMCG categories. The model showed that rather than repetitive brand loyalty, most consumers buy from a small repertoire of acceptable options.
The model reveals that many people purchase a brand only now and then, yet collectively they represent a huge share of total sales. This counters the popular pareto model that assumes 80% of profit comes from the top 20% of buyers.
Hovering around supermarket shelves in the eighties, observing consumer behaviour, and interacting where possible, the truth of this counter intuitive behaviour was clear. However, the pull of Pareto was powerful, so we often had a foot in both camps.
It is the mid 1980s, and yogurt is the new category growth star. Ski and Yoplait dominate store shelves. Shoppers have their personal preferences, some lean strongly toward Ski, others swear by Yoplait, and many have their flavour favourite across both. (they prefer Ski Strawberry to Yoplait, but the Yoplait apricot to Ski) A few smaller regional players also vie for attention, but if there’s a promotion, most consumers happily mix it up.
As the marketing manager that included Ski in the brand portfolio of responsibility during these heady growth days, it was easy to assume the Pareto principle held: 80% of profits come from 20% of devoted buyers. Focus on those heavy consumers, turn the moderate fans into loyalists, and watch the profits roll in, right?
The Dirichlet model exposed the paradox, although at the time I had not heard of it. However, the numbers coming from store sales data and simple observation of consumer behaviour in stores confirmed the consumers disassociation from the theory of Wilfredo Pareto.
So, how does the Dirichlet model suggest fast moving consumer marketers build their brands against competitive brands and the power of retailer ‘pirate’ brands?
Acknowledge Mixed Brand Buying.
Even if you’re proud of your loyal fans, don’t be blinded by them. Ski-lovers might switch to Yoplait for a flavour your brand doesn’t offer, or vice versa. The data shows people happily shop around, even if they have a ‘Favorite.’ Acknowlede that behaviour while creatively giving consumers reasons to buy yours in preference to others.
Look for Wider Reach.
Heavy users are part of the story, but broad availability is often the bigger deal. If your products aren’t visible, buyers won’t remember you at that decisive moment.
Keep Things Distinctive.
You’re not just building brand awareness, you’re building mental availability. That’s how you stay top-of-mind when the shopper sees a new promotion or wants a unique flavour. Whether through catchy ads, recognizable packaging, or fun limited-edition variants, it’s all about creating mental triggers.
Rotate and Refresh.
Both leading yoghurt brands tested new flavours and replaced underperformers regularly. This strategy not only sparked interest among loyal buyers but also tempted the light or occasional buyer who came for the novelty, and might just pick you again next time. It also pleased retailers to have a supplier that explicitly had a ‘one in one out’ brand policy.
Ultimately, the Dirichlet model teaches us that brand loyalty isn’t an all-or-nothing affair. Even with strong preferences, people jump around.
Consider that next time you’re rethinking a marketing campaign. It might feel odd to invest in those who buy you only once in a while, but that large group can deliver a collective boost that keeps you on top.
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Pareto killed by Dirichlet in blogs
The pareto principle holds in every domain I have ever seen, except one.
To build a brand, you must keep existing customers, increase their preference for your brand, and attract new customers.
A pareto allocation of marketing funds would imply that most of your budget should be aimed at the 20% of customers that produce 80% of your profit.
That allocation would work against you.
Truly loyal customers are less likely to go elsewhere than light or occasional buyers, and such an allocation does nothing to attract new users.
In this case, Pareto was wrong.
