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.
Header: via nano banana
Feb 16, 2026 | Change, Customers, Innovation
Customer centricity is a con. Average marketers chant it when they’ve run out of creativity, or bow to the accountants and lawyers who run the place.
Customers don’t hand you the truth. They hand you clues without knowing they are doing it.
They tell you what they can describe, which reflects the status quo. They cannot tell you easily how they feel, or where currently unrecognised added value may be possible.
The technology to compress audio files, turning them into mp3 files existed well before Apple turned it into the iPod. Sony was the tech master, they had led the miniaturisation of components, they even had arguably the ideal brand in ‘Walkman’, but they did not put it all together as Apple did. They extrapolated, rather than innovating in customer value delivery, as they simply did not recognise it.
If you want to be genuinely customer centric, stop treating opinions as instructions. Treat them as evidence. Ask what they were feeling when they said it. Ask what they were trying to avoid. Ask what risk they were trying to outsource to you.
People unconsciously decide with feeling, then they reverse‑engineer a neat explanation that sounds rational.
That’s why “listening to customers” so often produces incrementalism. You end up optimising the current system instead of escaping it.
Evolution doesn’t reward the most logical species. It rewards the most adaptable. Corporate life forgets this key fact. Leaders obsess over efficiency and certainty, then act surprised when the market moves under their feet.
Look at a beehive. A meaningful share of bees don’t optimise today’s nectar run. They explore. They go hunting for entirely new sources of nectar.
That looks irrational if you stare at this week’s spreadsheet. It’s essential if you care about next year, and the year after.
Customer centricity isn’t a slogan. It’s disciplined curiosity. It’s hypothesis, testing, and the courage to fund a few of your bees to fly the wrong way on purpose.
Just like a beehive, when we base resource allocation choices with long term impact on short term rational foundations, we miss all the creativity, colour and movement of what appears at first glance to be irrational behaviour, but which ensure survival.
Header: by Nano Banana
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.
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.
Sep 11, 2025 | Customers, Sales
Most sales processes, as distinct from the marketing task of lead generation, assumes the leads are already at least partly ‘on the hook’. They know what they want, they just need a clear, easy path to getting it. So, we map the journey, smooth the bumps, clear the friction, and jump to the close.
More often than not, people are faced with a situation, problem, some unmet need, and do not have a specific shopping list or even time-frame in which the nascent problem needs to be solved.
They want more time with family, lower costs, less complication, greater transparency, in other words, an outcome rather than a product.
In these common circumstances, calling them a “customer” or even ‘potential customer’ too early is a mistake. It leads to thinking “How do we get them to buy our thing?” rather than “How do we help them solve the problem they have.
Our first task is to adequately define the problem to be solved, the context to be addressed.
Language matters. The words we use shape what we see, feel, and think, and drives others to conclusions. The word “customer” has a lot of baggage in the heads of most sales and marketing people.
When my son and his wife were expecting my first grandchild, they needed a more family-oriented vehicle that easily accommodated the baby capsule his beloved coupe could not.
Not getting enough sleep? is it the mattress, partner snoring, stress keeping you awake, or the truck air brakes on the hill outside the bedroom?
It is hard to know the circumstances of the shape of the opportunity and the manner in which you should approach it in the absence of the individual detail.
Jumping too early to a conclusion based on some avatar, template, or generic sales funnel will just ensure you miss the real opportunity. This comes from being able to specifically articulate their problem and the opportunity to describe how your solution delivers the desired outcome better than any alternative.
Ditch the generic lens and start by considering the range of possible contexts and their individual solutions. That’s where the creative insights that make the sale for you hide.
Situations create a buyer.
Needs that cover a huge range from pressing physical needs to keeping up with the Jones’s create a buyer.
People with credit cards extended are the outcome.
This is not just a semantic shift, it is the difference between the hard sell and having them come to you already sold.
Header credit: The great ‘marketoonist’ Tom Fishburne
Jun 25, 2025 | AI, Customers, Lean, Operations
The idea of the OODA loop is to get inside the decision cycle of your opposition. Once inside, you control the outcome in the absence of some externality.
Toyota used this idea to destroy Detroit.
The Andon cord placed the power of tactical decision making about quality right at the point where it was needed, with the workers on the production line.
By this means, quality problems were identified and fixed before they moved a further step towards the customer.
It also did something else.
By identifying and fixing problems at the source, the cycle of problem fixing was accelerated greatly. Not every problem can be fixed immediately at the line, but there are processes for escalation, from the front lines to the lowest level that is empowered to address the problem. That escalation involved suppliers when the problem was caused by a supplied part that was substandard.
By contrast, Detroit was driven from the top down, being run by spreadsheets (handwritten until the 90’s) by executives who may never have seen the inside of the factory.
A problem as it escalates up a chain of command has many opportunities to be buried, forgotten, miscommunicated, all of which will happen, driven by all sorts of human frailties and power games. The end result, the little problem in the factory compounds and becomes a big problem with customers, which costs a lot to address, and ruins reputations.
Toyota got well inside the time it took Detroit to respond to problems. While Detroit was escalating or hiding quality problems, Toyota was fixing them and moving on the next improvement.
They were inside the OODA loop of Detroit, and it destroyed the American car industry.
AI is now giving users an easy tool to get inside the decision cycle of their competition, while seeing the productivity benefits drop to their bottom line.
How are you going to deal with that?
