May 30, 2025 | AI, Marketing
The market research industry turns over big dollars by providing reassurance to marketers that when they are wrong, they have an acceptable excuse.
The recent election campaign and associated polls demonstrate comprehensively how broken market research can be. It should have been simple. Is Labor going to win, will the conservatives take the lollies, or will it be a split result? It was almost a binary choice, but no poll I saw was even close.
Given that failure, how in heaven’s name can we reasonably expect such a broken system to deliver reliable answers to challenging questions about the future behaviour of customers and potential customers in a competitive and volatile environment? Add into the mix the inability of most marketers to understand the competing forces in their market sufficiently well to ask good questions and therefore write quality research briefs. That delivers a perfect recipe for pissing money against the wall in pursuit of reassurance.
Over the years as a much younger marketer, I spent a lot of money on market research. It took a while, but I did come to realise the data was only a tiny proportion of the game. The real challenge was building the wisdom, insight, and market gutfeel to be able to ask those really good questions. Then, when a surprising response emerged, have the curiosity to further interrogate it from a positive and genuinely inquisitive perspective to get an answer to the eternal question: Why is it so?
In the last year or so, and accelerating at an astonishing rate, is the ability delivered by AI to gather and process market and behavioural information that can be used to ask those challenging; why is it so’ questions.
The process of market research has been totally up-ended. No longer do you need to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over months to get shallow and often dated results. Now you can replicate the task quickly and cheaply with superior results using AI, and what is emerging as ‘synthetic research’.
Traditional research is good at telling you what has happened. It is good at counting. However, if you need to know what will happen in the future, and you use yesterdays tools, good luck!
May 16, 2025 | Marketing
Unfortunately, there is no single silver marketing bullet.
There are hordes of so-called marketing experts out there who will flog you a package of promises, digital and otherwise, that almost always end up being hollow.
Marketing success evolves from strategy, making really tough choices in the absence of perfect information, then implementing, learning, and going again.
It requires you to make choices about the future, and how you will face it, shape it and leverage it.
You cannot look at the numbers, they do not exist yet.
You cannot look to the success of others, and successfully copy and paste, as every challenge and context is different.
You must forge your own way, while learning the lessons of others and applying them to your situations.
The only silver bullet in marketing, just like every other field of endeavour, is time, energy, focus, compounding domain knowledge, and perseverance.
Get those five factors aligned, and you will have a good chance of winning.
Apr 24, 2025 | AI, Marketing, Strategy
‘Lean thinking’ is a mindset and toolbox to drive optimisation. Little more, beyond the use of common sense and humanity.
Prominent amongst the tools, and the one I probably use the most is ‘5 why’.
AI has given us an entirely new use case that leverages the insights that a 5 why process when done thoughtfully can deliver.
Prompt development.
There are now hundreds of prompt templates and mnemonics emerging from the woodwork, many claiming to be ‘the one’.
All I have seen use a variation of the Lean ‘5 why’ tool.
Most AI users look at the first output of a prompt into any of the LLM tools, and it is sub-par. Generic recitations of what the trained information base reflects as best practice. The beauty of these data driven assistants is that you can push back as much as you like without them taking it personally.
You can point out areas of failure, misinformation, gobbledy-gook, or imagined fairy tales. You can ask for specifics, deeper analysis, sources, or give it examples. The output then improves with each iteration.
You can also ask it what you might have forgotten to ask, or has been missed for some reason, and ask for suggestions. This interrogation of the tool can reveal things you would not have thought of under normal circumstances.
Go through that process 5 times, and in all likelihood, you will not only have something entirely different to the first response, but it will also be infinitely better, and tailored to the need. You will have cleared away the unnecessary, banal, insignificant, and generic, leaving a response that equates to a first principle response to your evolved prompting.
Continuous improvement by AI driven lean thinking.
What a boon!
Apr 14, 2025 | Change, Communication, Governance, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
When you look you see Hofstadter’s law around you everywhere, every day.
We all understand Murphy’s law, which accurately states that is something can go wrong it will, probably at the worst time. Murphy has a sibling, articulated by Douglas Hofstadter which states: ‘A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law’.
Planning is a part of our lives. Some things are easy to plan, the consistent characteristic of these is that there are very few variables over which you do not have control. For example planning a trip to the supermarket, you can check what you need you control the time, the choice of supermarket, where you park, how you work the store, the choices you make between brands. Very few uncontrolled variables.
By contrast strategy is an exercise not just in predicting the future, but then making choices how best to deploy your resources in a way that enables you to shape the future to your benefit by exerting some influence over the range of variables over which you have no control.
Entirely different challenge, as there is never an explicit ‘right’ answer.
When we talk about strategic planning we are effectively mixing two incompatible factors. The uncertainty of the future and the forces over which we have no control, and the certainty of the resources we have to deploy, with uncertain outcomes.
Currently in this country we have a huge black hole called defence planning into which billions of taxpayers dollars are being poured, in the mistaken view that we are able to predict the future and therefore plan as if we could control the variables.
The better way is to have a robust strategy which enables flexibility in the way assets are deployed short term.
Projects tend to expand to fill a time available, while at the same time we habitually underestimate the time that is required to complete any given task, no matter how rigorous we are in the planning.
Apr 3, 2025 | Branding, Marketing
I should define ‘Lousy’.
A lousy ad is one that fails to build on what has gone before. In the absence of anything before, it fails to leave a positive impression in the mind of current and any potential buyer who falls within the profile of the ideal customer.
When a lousy ad is recognised, it is usually dropped, but often against much corporate bleating.
The accountants will bleat that the ad cost x to make, the media cost y, and the other costs such as POS material, money flung at ‘influencers’ digital agency costs, and so on, cost Z, giving a total cost to the marketing budget as X + Y + Z = big sunk cost.
The product manager in charge will bleat that the ad did not have time to work, or that it has been misunderstood, and the initial reaction of the intended audience misleading.
The operations people will bleat that they have stacked inventory to the roof in expectation of an increase in demand.
Everyone has a reason.
Brand advertising, as distinct from the ‘get it now for a give-away price’ advertising is all about influencing behaviour in your favour, now, and into the future.
The greatest outcome is that a ‘purchase habit’ is formed. This is to my mind different to the standard definitions of ‘brand loyalty’ which usually include a set of trade-offs in the consumers mind that settle on the brand to which they are loyal most often.
Habit is different.
Habit does not include that internal conversation. It is the autopilot that lifts the product from the shelf, and simply does not consider alternatives.
When you materially change a product, even in a superficial way, you force those habits to be questioned. Elsewhere I have recounted the greatest marketing mistake I ever made by disregarding this truth, which I did not at the time consider.
Publishing an ad, or any sort of media or marketing collateral that is inconsistent with that basic assumption of the habit, will risk the volumes and margin of those most habitual customers.
There are sometimes good reasons to update.
Times and the world change, so brands must also evolve to continue to reflect the worlds in which customers live. When that strategic choice is made, the astute marketer will ensure there is a highly visible ‘line of crumbs’ between the old and the new to minimise the potential disruption to normal service.
Failure to define that line will result in nothing good.
Consider the recent advertising for Jaguar, trumpeting a rebirth of the brand.
Pity the cars will not be on the market for some time, although I suspect even if they were, the sales register would not notice.
Elsewhere I have panned it, but to continue, it breaks any connection anyone, potential Jaguar buyer had with the brand. This ‘New jaguar’ nonsense means they must start from scratch, if not behind the starting line, to establish a set of behavioural drivers that result in the choice to buy a Jag instead of one of the many alternatives.
Are you building your brand, or giving money away?
Mar 31, 2025 | Marketing, Strategy
Most businesses confuse price with pricing.
Price is just the number you slap on the tag. Pricing is the process that gets you to the right number, the one that optimises today’s profit while building tomorrow’s success.
Unfortunately, most businesses treat pricing as an inclusive way to do cost-plus calculations. The finance team sets a target margin, the sales team references the market leader, and the final number is more wishful thinking than strategy.
That is not pricing. That is strategic abdication.
Real pricing is deliberate. Strategic. Ruthlessly focused on outcomes.
You see strategic pricing in odd places.
That wine list at your favourite restaurant with the most expensive bottle first on the list. It is not an accident, done alphabetically, or random. That $500 wine is not there to sell, although occasionally it might. It is there to make the $70 bottle that costs $30 in the grog shop next door, look like a bargain.
Rolls-Royce does not put their cars into motor shows anymore. Why park next to a $30k Toyota and look ridiculously expensive when you can park next to a $10 million jet and look like a ‘pocket change’ purchase by comparison.
It’s called context, and it matters. Dan Ariely nailed this in a classic experiment using subscription costs to the Economist, and his MIT graduate students as the research fodder.
First version:
- Web only: $59
- Print only: $125.
- Web + Print: $125
Result? Almost everyone picked the combo. The web + print option made it look like they were getting a version for free.
Second version:
- Web only: $59
- Web + Print: $125
This time, far fewer picked the combo. Why? No dummy option to anchor the deal.
That’s the decoy effect in action. It works because humans do not make rational decisions. We make comparative ones. Smart pricing taps into that.
Great pricing is not about squeezing the lemon. It is about understanding your customer, your position, and your objective.
Most small businesses leave money on the table by setting their prices too low, hoping never to lose a sale. However, you need to lose a lot of sales to make up for the positive bottom line impact of even a very small increase in the average price.
Want to prove that to yourself?
Track the impact of a 1% price increase through your P&L. Assuming you are using actual costs instead of some sort of confected percentage calculations, the whole amount of the increase will drop to the bottom line as increased profit.
You will never just slap a price on a label again.
