Apr 7, 2026 | Marketing
Lead magnets are on life support. The requirement that a responder gives their details before being able to access the ‘value’ behind the wall, is being replaced by ‘no strings’ delivery of real value.
Requiring contact details before delivering value used to work, and sometimes still does. However, you need to be lucky enough to find someone whose exact problem you can solve, who is in the market when they see your tempting magnets. Experience tells us all that following filling in the form, will result in a deluge of unwanted emails, phone calls from disinterested callers with funny accents, and related pop-ups.
Most now think ‘no thanks’ and move on.
Robert Cialdini in his landmark 1984 book ‘Persuasion’ noted ‘Reciprocity’ as one of the drivers of human behaviour. When we give something of value, no matter how small, it sets up a loop in the receivers’ mind that encourages them to reciprocate in some way. This effect has been validated numerous times in tests, and most people recognise it when it applies to them.
So, by asking for an email address before delivering something of value, we are throwing this driver of human behaviour out the window.
Last week in a supermarket I was approached by a very skilled product demonstrator to try her product. It was a blue cheese new to the market, and being a lover of blue cheese, I was happy to try it, and then, I did buy a pack. Had she asked me to fill in a form that gave my name, phone number, and email address before being able to taste the cheese, there is no way I would have done so.
Your failing lead magnet suffers from reverse reciprocity. It is like trying to push two similarly polarised magnets together, it does not work. The rapid replacement of suggested search sites to seek an answer, with the specific answer to a question delivered by AI is the headstone of the lead magnet.
Instead, you should lead with generosity, offer real value with no strings, remove all the friction felt by someone who may be interested, and pique that interest by offering no strings value while making the next logical step obvious.
The strategic challenge is no longer the shape and efficient functioning of your sales funnel. It is now how you attract possible customers into your funnel at all. Attention and tricks are is no longer enough; you need to engage with generosity, which will from time to time, activate reciprocity.
Feb 10, 2026 | Marketing
Creativity does not emerge from the ether. It comes from the many rarely used corners of your brain, and from the collective brains of your networks.
It comes from not accepting the status quo automatically. You look for the edges, the unexplained, the outliers. You ask better questions of customers, suppliers, science, and you are aware of the trends and problems in your surroundings.
Creativity is a process, not a miracle. It takes practice, refinement, and a preparedness to see alternatives where others do not. You need to accept being wrong, understand why you were wrong, and build on the lesson.
Creativity is also a word that means many different things to different people.
To a painter, creativity will most likely be entirely different to the creativity expressed by a mathematician, musician, or entrepreneur.
However, all ‘artists’ no matter their domain, and often not even consciously, ask themselves the same three questions:
Why?
What if?
How?
Issac Newton can only have come up with his theory explaining gravity after the apple bonked him on the head by asking himself ‘Why?
George de Mestral must have asked himself ‘what if I can replicate and manufacture the natural ‘stickiness’ of these burrs on my britches after I walk across the paddock, to come up with Velcro?
James Dyson did ask himself ‘how can I replicate the industrial cyclone technology used in sawmills in a household vacuum cleaner? In fact, he asked himself that question 5,127 times before, on the 5,128th prototype, he cracked it.
Next time you are faced with a challenge, no matter how big or small, I suggest you try asking yourself these three questions.
You might surprise yourself and discover you can be quite creative!
Header cartoon: Obviously comes from the late, great Charles Shultz.
Dec 15, 2025 | Analytics, Governance, Marketing
Marketers must understand the jargon of the boardroom if they are to contribute meaningfully to the critical strategic conversation. Too often they are sidelined by lack of this understanding, resulting in dumb choices being made by those who think strategy development and the deployment of these strategies is some form of hocus pocus.
Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) tell different stories about the quality of the management choices being made.
ROA is a measure of how effectively the enterprise is using the assets it has to generate a profit. It is the ratio of net income divided by total assets.
ROE is a measure of how effectively the enterprise is leveraging the use of the equity, capital supplied by the owners, to generate profits. It is the ratio of profits divided by equity.
Together they measure how well a management is doing at managing the enterprise on behalf of the owners. The major difference is the financial leverage delivered by the debt the enterprise uses to generate profits. The greater the distance between these two ratios the greater is the reliance on debt to fund activities. Conversely the closer they are, the less debt is on the balance sheet. In the absence of debt, the ROA and the ROE would be the same.
Every enterprise faces the choice of funding sources: debt or equity. If they choose to take on debt, or ‘financial leverage’ its ROE would be higher than its ROA only if the company earns more on the borrowed funds than the cost of borrowing.
You will often hear the term ‘financial engineering’. In its simplest form, it is the management of the balance between debt and equity, usually in response to interest rates, and expectations of those rates, and the expectations of dividends to be returned to shareholders out of profits.
I found the following example contained in an explanation of the ‘DuPont Identity’
Imagine a fictional company ABC with the following financials:
- Net Income = $1,000,000
- Average Total Assets = $4,000,000
- Average Shareholders’ Equity = $2,000,000
ROA = Net Income / Average Total Assets = $1,000,000 / $4,000,000 = 25%
ROE = Net Income / Average Shareholders’ Equity = $1,000,000 / $2,000,000 = 50%
In this example, ABC generates $0.25 in profit for each dollar of assets and $0.50 in profit for each dollar of shareholders’ equity. ROE is higher than ROA in this example, as it does not account for all assets, including debt. If total assets were equal to shareholder equity, then ROA and ROE would provide the same result.
As noted, while it may sound like accounting jargon, marketers simply must understand the terminology if they are to avoid being sidelined when it really counts.
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.
