The Accidental Marketer Australia

30/08/2026

For the past three days, I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Tammy's Table Business Community retreat with close friends and good associates who run small businesses here in South Australia.

In a busy world that asks us to value immediate gratification and commoditisation, I can’t express how wonderful it felt to spend three days together, in person, sharing ideas, experiences and rich, meaningful conversation.

Our conference packs also included some generous and thoughtfully chosen gifts from businesses within our community.

I’d love you to take a look through them, make a note of the businesses and, if you don’t already have an existing relationship and need one of these products or services, please seek them out first.

I feel very lucky to have shared the wisdom, laughter and genuine connection with this group. I’ve arrived home deeply grateful, with my heart very full.

28/08/2026

I laughed when I spotted this fishy mock up on the Vistaprint website today. See it? 👀

Note: AI used to shapen text quality.

09/07/2026

When you know *exactly* who is responsible. The joys of co-working!

01/07/2026

Your AI-generated logo isn’t protected by copyright and is more likely to make you blend in than stand out.

Before you hand your logo over to AI, here are two things worth thinking about: brand distinctiveness and your ability to protect it.

Life is demanding for Accidental Marketers. AI can start to feel like your best friend and your marketing saviour: it’s fast, cheap and accessible. You need a logo? You type in a prompt. It gives you one you like.

But stay with me here…

AI is working from what already exists. It has learned from patterns across a huge amount of data and is designed around probability. It gives you the most likely answer, not the most distinctive one.

AI’s default output is producing what’s most common. This goes against a fundamental requirement of a logo: to make you stand out.

Over time, you’ll invest money and effort into making your logo recognisable, and that value becomes worth protecting.

But if you’ve used AI to generate your logo, you won’t own the copyright. According to Arts Law, copyright in Australia depends on independent human intellectual effort.

While you can register an AI-generated logo as a trade mark, you can run into problems if it’s too similar to an existing trade mark, and it can be difficult to defend if you need to.

Your visual identity is anchored by your logo, second only to your business name in importance.

👀 Your logo walks ahead of you into every room.

That’s why investing in a human designer is worthwhile, even when it feels like a big investment.

🍍Before anyone starts designing, start with a solid brief.

A marketer can help you make top-level decisions about your positioning, audience, pricing and the signals you need your brand to send, so your designer understands their mission.

AI is brilliant for exploring ideas. But it’s best in a support role once the big decisions have been made.

Don’t put your most distinctive brand asset in the hands of a tool built to give you the average of what already exists.

Your brand should be made to stand out.

23/06/2026

Sometimes…

… I doodle in class.

30/05/2026

We’ve all been there…

You’re researching a product online and an avalanche of ads for alternatives suddenly floods your feed.

You’re now weighing up many options, so you head to the reviews section to find out what other customers think.

But here’s the sting.

Not everyone who wants to sell you something has principles and not every review is real.

Look out for:

- Reviews that all sound similar
- An unusually high number of top ratings
- Reviews with very little detail
- Review numbers that don’t add up

A fishy website sparked this post. The review count said 20, but there were almost five hundred five star reviews.

Website glitch? Maybe, but it was enough to put me off entirely.

🍍 If you’re collecting reviews for your own business, make them better by giving your customers a prompt.

“What was the most valuable part of your experience?”

The more specific the answer, the better it will work for you.

🫐 Huckleberry Hint: Look beyond the stars when you’re reading reviews, and ask for detail when you’re collecting them.

22/05/2026

For the record, I would like to confirm I was not … I repeat, not behind Adelaide’s googly-eye movement of 2022. We seem to have shared a vision though. 👀

Adelaide once had someone running around sticking giant googly eyes on public stuff and it was the exact level of crime that city could emotionally handle.

KFC Colonel? Cross-eyed. Dan Murphy’s sign? Cooked. Colonel Light looking over the city? Suddenly staring at the ground and sky at the same time like he’d just seen Hindley Street at 2am.

Authorities were doing the usual “we don’t condone vandalism” bit, while half the city was like… yeah fair, but also, this is the best thing that’s happened all week.

19/05/2026

If you are an Accidental Marketer who has different people handling social media, email marketing your website or have outsourced any part of your marketing activities, you need to understand the difference between channel strategy and marketing strategy.

Here is a snapshot on my way out the door to help you understand what can happen if you don’t have both.

14/05/2026

You've bought the ad space. But are you using it well?

I've been working with Mel and the team at LRB Legal for more than a year to evolve their marketing. It started with brand positioning and developing the tagline:

Swift legal guidance and expert resolution.

One of the shifts I’ve made in their advertising approach is using creative hooks to help the message get noticed.

This example was for a sign being placed in a row of many others on a fence. So to help LRB stand out, I used a bit of contextual humour that connected a core brand attribute – swiftness – with the situation:

🍍Swift legal guidance that won't leave you hanging – unlike this sign.

Once your positioning is clear, you can start finding more interesting ways to express it.

And you’re much more likely to be noticed than if you run another generic “call us for expert legal advice” message.

That’s the difference between buying the space and making it work for you.

Let me know if you'd to learn more about this service.

26/04/2026

I love this example of clear communication. It’s tempting to make things too complicated in our business communications. One tip is to start with a bulleted list - a bit like this sign. Once you have the key points you want to make, then you can then flesh out the story and add your personality.

Enjoy the hot-rock day! ☀️