May 12, 2026 | Uncategorized
Price is often the last thing considered, and then only briefly, inconsistently, by the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons. This is a huge mistake many, if not most make.
The pricing architecture you put in place is a foundational driver of strategy implementation. That statement assumes you have a well thought out, documented strategy.
Irrespective of the standard of your strategy, sticker price can be a determining factor in a purchase decision. It may not be the first thing they see when contemplating a purchase, but it is usually the ‘pepper stroke’ in the process.
Failing to consider the strategic implications of both strategic and tactical choices surrounding your price will result in suboptimal outcomes. Price is the single biggest contributor to profitability over which management has complete control.
The fundamental mistake many businesses make is to set prices on a range of parameters that have little to do with how customers assess value. Customers do not care how much a product costs, how you cover your overheads, or how much profit the owners demand, they only care about what it delivers for them.
A customer sees a price and instantly makes a judgement. Most often this judgement is subconscious, automatic and unappreciated, similar to the ‘fight or flight’ response to danger we all understand.
Daniel Kahneman gave us the best starting point in Thinking, Fast and Slow. We do not meet price first as rational calculators. We meet it first as animals with memory, fear, ego, habits, shortcuts, and a deep reluctance to feel foolish.
System 1 reacts first.
System 2 arrives later, when and if it is given a chance.
In a commercial context, the ticket price seen by a potential customer is the beginning of the process of determining if a transaction will occur. That process is the assessment of a range of behavioural drivers of the purchase, followed by a more quantitative assessment that leads to the conversion, or not. In a supermarket, these two elements of the whole process may take place in an instant, or it may be a bit longer as a consumer assesses the value of their regular purchase against that of an alternative on special. In a situation where the purchase is much more expensive, so comes with greater consequences, the process can take months, or longer.
The supposition implicit in a sticker price is that you have built a solid strategy and have made the usually challenging choices surrounding the five elements of the pricing architecture: the strategic priorities, the business model, level of market power, price packaging, and the behavioural drivers you will engage.
May 8, 2026 | AI, Marketing
When you see something unlikely, from out on the fringes, don’t just dismiss it as some sort of anomaly. Dig deeper, look for the cause, every now and again that search will deliver a nugget of innovation
The header photograph of goats in trees is typical
There is a particular evolution of flexible hooves and an enhanced sense of balance that has enabled local goats to climb the Agania tree, native to southern Morocco. The motivation for the goats is the fruit of the tree, an important source of nutrition. The goats eat the fruit and spit the pip providing another one of nature’s wonderful collaborative relationships.
When you see something unexpected, unlikely, or just plain bonkers out on the fringes, it makes sense to have a close look to understand why. Sometimes there will be a nugget of truth hiding in the ‘bonkers’.
In this case there is the nugget of truth, but the photograph does not reflect that truth. An enterprising local goatherd ties young goats to the tree, and then hits up the tourists for a tip when they take photos.
Word of the unusual engaging, unlikely, and interesting stuff like a tree adorned with goats tends to spread. Often the unreality of it hides the nugget of truth.
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.
Mar 30, 2026 | Governance, Leadership
In the pre-internet age, facts had a pedigree. You could trace them back to a source, weigh their credibility, and argue your position with some confidence. These days, we are so awash with claimed ‘facts’ that we are overwhelmed. Cheap, mass-produced, often anonymous ‘facts’ handed from one digital platform, morphed and handed on again. No clear origin, no accountability, just noise, self-serving claims, paranoia, or dreams, dressed up as certainty.
That creeping uncertainty has seeped into every corner of our lives, mostly unnoticed. The rules we live by are still shaped by politicians and enforced by institutions funded with our tax dollars. But the values behind those rules have all but disappeared.
We used to look for consistency. If someone claimed to value integrity, we expected them to act like it. Now we get performative posturing. Followed by policy U-turns, PR spin, or flat-out contradiction.
When behaviour doesn’t match the values on the label, it screams hypocrisy. As the old marketing joke goes ‘the consumer is not stupid, she is your wife’
We’re hardwired to trust facts. However, when the ‘facts’ themselves are selectively shaped, bent to fit a narrative, or worse, manufactured from thin air, we get understandably anxious and likely to distrust.
In its mild form, this is spin. In its extreme form, it’s lying. Denial. Gaslighting.
Hypocrisy is no longer just the politician’s disease; it has crept into every corner of our lives.
Public debate has been hijacked by competing ‘facts’. Not competing opinions. Competing truths. There’s no transparency, because transparency forces accountability. When nobody is accountable, integrity goes out the window.
Integrity now is so rare we wouldn’t recognise it even if it walked up and smacked us with a code of conduct.
The result? Polarisation.
Information travels faster than reflection. The moment a ‘fact’ hits the feed, the rebuttal, if it exists at all, is buried under a pile of clickbait. And if by chance a real fact does slip through, one that’s been tested, sourced, and stands up to scrutiny, it gets drowned in the noise.
Knowledge used to mean something. Now it’s riddled with bias, spin, and wishful thinking. Often wrong. Always louder than it should be.
That erosion of clarity has gutted our trust in political systems. We expect spin, so we ignore or do not recognise the occasional truth when it confronts us. When we stop trusting the institutions, we stop trusting what they publish, even when they’re right, imagination and conspiracy theories take their place.
What follows is stubbornness disguised as principle.
We cling harder to our own view, no matter how flawed. We trust only those who confirm it. Collaboration becomes competition. Dialogue turns into tribal shouting.
Meanwhile, confirmation bias is doing its work: steering our decisions, shaping our teams, and wrecking our ability to truly listen.
So, what’s the fix?
Truth. Accountability. Transparency. Not slogans. Actions.
Tell the truth based on facts you can trace. Show your working. Hold yourself and others to the same standard. Accept that facts evolve, but insist that the path of that evolution is open for all to see.
That’s how you earn trust back. One uncomfortable truth at a time.
Header credit: A single panel from and old ‘First dog on the moon’ cartoon says it all.
Dec 8, 2025 | AI
AI is stripping out the commercial friction that previously required middle management as coordinators.
The old vertical model, with layers of functions passing work up and down the organisational pyramid, is being replaced by horizontal flows of cross-functional orchestration.
Traditional organisations run on vertical alignment. Each function optimises its own sequence of tasks, reporting neatly up the line. It looks tidy on a chart but in reality can be chaotic. Customers don’t live in your vertical world. They move sideways, across sales, production, logistics, and service, expecting a seamless experience.
AI is flipping that organisational pyramid on its side. It can connect once-isolated functions into a single horizontal process. What was once delegated up and down now needs to be orchestrated across.
Sequential processes, the bread and butter of functional work, are predictable. They’re easy to automate and improve. But the processes that serve customers aren’t sequential. They are coordinated, and they demand awareness of what’s happening across functions, not just within them.
This difference matters. Sequential work relies on delegation. Coordinated work requires orchestration. The first is mechanical; the second is more like music.
To orchestrate effectively, AI needs agency. It must be allowed to make choices within parameters, not just follow a script. Without that, automation collapses into the same bottlenecks middle management used to create while claiming to fix them. True orchestration demands that machines can choose the next note when the music changes.
This is gold for the cost hawks and process zealots who love squeezing inefficiency from sequential work. It is also gold for the customer-facing teams, because orchestration delivers something far more valuable: speed. When everything else is roughly equal, price, specification, guarantees, two things decide who wins.
- Delivered In Full, On Time, what was promised when it was promised, without error.
- Cycle time, how fast an order moves from request to fulfilment.
Do both better than the competition and you are operating inside their OODA loop, seeing, deciding, and acting faster than they can react.
AI will not just make work faster. It will force organisations to decide whether they develop and trust their AI systems more than existing their manual processes. That is not a technical question, it’s cultural: and it is coming faster than most hierarchies can flatten.
