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.
Header via Chat.
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 1, 2025 | Marketing, Strategy, Uncategorized
Management attention is an investment.
However, I have never seen a calculation of that investment made without the benefit of hindsight. Considering the return on management attention (ROMA) seems to be a sensible element of investment due diligence.
As a consultant I’m always urging clients to focus their resources, time, money, expertise, operational capacity against a narrow field. This focus of resource is always superior to a generalised approach in winning in the short term.
Nowhere are military metaphors more appropriate then in a competitive commercial environment. Every general knows that to win the battle, he needs overwhelming force in a specific space.
However, every general also knows that a war is not won in a single battle. To win the war, you also must be able to adjust to changes in the context in which the war is being waged and respond accordingly.
Years ago, while working for Cerebos, I was responsible for Cerola muesli, now departed from supermarket shelves. In those days there were only a few major SKUs in the breakfast cereal aisle. Wheat Bix, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Rice bubbles, and a few other relatively minor SKUs. Muesli was out on the fringes, widely seen as ‘tree hugger food’.
As an extension to Cerola, we created a strategy that straddled the gap between those major cereals and muesli and named it ‘Light & Crunchy’.
We launched it into a test in South Australia. We believed we could build the Cerola brand to be more than just ‘hippie-food’ by creating a new category in the Cereal market. There was an unmet need, a potential gap in the market. That gap could be leveraged (we believed) with a good product and effective marketing programs to generate trial, which would lead to repeat purchase.
The early stages of the test were an enormous success. We easily got retail distribution, consumer trial and repurchase rates that were well above our benchmarks for a successful test.
The significant miscalculation made was not anticipating the weight of the response from Kellogg’s.
It came very quickly with a competitive product called ‘Just Right’, a direct copy of Light and Crunchy. Just Right still exists, which validates our identification of the unmet need. Kellogg’s competitive launch was supported by overwhelming advertising, consumer promotions, and instore promotional support. That massive, focused response by Kellogg’s simply blew us away, and killed any thoughts of continuing.
Kellogg’s saw our test launch of Light & Crunchy as a significant incursion into their territory. They had previously left us alone in Muesli. Research indicated that muesli, as it had been, was not competing for the same consumers who were purchasing Corn Flakes, Rice Bubbles, and Sanitarium’s Wheat Bix.
With Cerola Light and Crunchy, we changed that, and Kellogg’s reacted with extreme aggression. I had failed to anticipate the reaction, which was with the benefit of hindsight, absolutely predictable.
The real lesson was that we did not have what it took to be competent in the breakfast cereal market. While competence is a term that most would see as a measure of skill, in this instance it was more than that. It was a measure also of our depth of knowledge of the market, the competitive drivers that existed, and sufficiently deep pockets to wage a competitive war on Kellogg’s home turf.
Our attention was too focussed on the opportunity we saw in the market, but substantially lacking in attention to the wider competitive context. We had a skewed focus of attention, and the return on that lack of attention taught us a painful lesson.
‘ROMA’. Return on Management Attention, is always a strategic driver, rarely adequately considered.
Sep 29, 2025 | Marketing
Customers buy to relieve some sort of pain, or fill a need. Sometimes that pain is real, the need genuine, and sometimes it just takes the form of a psychological itch that needs scratching.
Whatever the form and source or type of the pain, nobody buys without it, so your product is medicine for that pain.
Why don’t you tell them that more often?
Be clear: ‘This product is for people who……..’
Many years ago I was marketing manager of the Dairy foods division of the then Australian owned Dairy farmers Ltd. We marketed Ski yogurt, and had been killed by Yoplait who launched with great advertising, packaging innovation, and a pretty good product that had massively increased yoghurt consumption, with them taking all the benefit.
The manufacturing process installed to produce Yoplait ensured that there was no discrete fruit pieces in the end product. It may have been strawberry yogurt, but the product was completely homogeneous. The process Dairy Farmers had installed was different, and we could produce a product with discrete and obvious fruit pieces.
The core of platform of our marketing and innovation processes become ‘Ski: for those who like to see pieces of fruit n their yoghurt. We never used this line, but it was implicit in everything we did.
5 years later, Ski was market leader in a market many times bigger than when Yoplait had launched. While it may not have been painful to buy a fruited yoghurt with no discrete pieces of fruit, when the offer was made, the preference of many became immediately clear.
Sadly, the innovative momentum that drove both Ski and Yoplait was dissipated by a presumed plateau in the market size in the mid nineties, and resultant transfer of resources and energy to kow-towing to retailers.
Sep 1, 2025 | Analytics, Marketing
Goodhart’s law tells us that when a measure becomes a KPI, it ceases to be a good measure. The full text of his observation appeared in the footnotes of his presentation at a conference in 1970 held by the Reserve Bank of Australia: “Whenever a government seeks to rely on previously observed statistical regularity for control purposes that regularity will collapse’
That observation is as relevant to every enterprise as it is to government.
Every dashboard produced by CRM systems I have seen makes the mistake of trashing Dr. Goodhardt’s insight.
Customers are subjected to all sorts of profiling as marketers do another iteration of their ‘ideal customers’ and ‘customer Journey’ maps using a different set of assumptions.
One set rarely used, at least rarely in my experience is the ‘inert’ customer.
Most analyses of customers I have seen use some variation of the pareto distribution. A few customers are deemed heavy users, with a decreasing level of usage down to light and occasional. The only alternative to one of these descriptions is ‘Lost’.
Any examination of ‘lost’ customers will reveal that a significant percentage of them are those that simply went ‘inert’ following a failure of customer service to meet their expectations.
For some, the expectations are unrealistic, for others, it is more like a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders. These customers are not lost, they may be just inert, and possibly able to be reactivated by a demonstration of the customer service they expected being available.
Figuring out who in your lost customers list is really just inert may just require asking. This is always far cheaper, and in my experience, more effective than hunting for new customers.
A former client had an extensive list of what they deemed ‘lost’ opportunities. They sold (and still do) a complex product that did a specific job much better than the alternative standard product. When they interrogated that ‘Lost’ data base they discovered that a sizeable proportion had not bought elsewhere. They had gone ‘inert.’ Some were just waiting for a ‘nudge’ which was often just the information and reassurance that the product they initially enquired about was the most appropriate for the job that they had put on the back burner.
Header: Charles Goodhardt speaking to a large audience.
