More marketing isn't necessarily the answer. Better decisions usually are.
Adding activity is the easiest response to a growth problem and the hardest to unwind. It also tends to postpone the diagnosis by a year.
Explore Growth Decisions →Insights
Things worth thinking about.
The ideas I find myself coming back to in conversations with business leaders. Practical observations on strategy, customers, positioning and marketing effectiveness.
On AI specifically, the questions I get asked most, and my answers, are collected in AI in marketing: where it creates value.
See also: on where AI is genuinely changing marketing practice in this market rather than the hype around it, the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing is tracking it more closely than most.
Marketing can look incredibly busy and still create very little commercial value.
Busy is easy to evidence. Value takes an agreement about what counts, and a willingness to look at what would have happened anyway.
Explore Marketing Effectiveness →Before you spend more, work out where you're getting value today.
Most budgets contain spend nobody would approve if it were proposed fresh. It survives because it's already in the base.
Explore Marketing Investment →The best marketing strategy isn't the one with the most initiatives. It's the one with the clearest choices.
If you can't name what the organisation has decided not to do, you have a plan rather than a strategy.
Explore Strategy Decisions →Sometimes the most useful marketing advice is knowing what not to do.
Stopping something well is an underrated commercial skill. It frees the money and the attention that everything else needs.
Explore Independent Advice →Your biggest customers and your best customers are often not the same customers.
Once cost to serve and discounting are included, the ranking usually changes. Sometimes dramatically.
Explore Customer Value →Selected Work
Where this thinking has been put to work.
Three short accounts of what the work looked like, and what changed.