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Why the Click is Dying and Consumers Let AI Do all the Shopping.

No one wants to do manual labor anymore. Consumer behavior has shifted from automatic browsing to delegating work to AI to do it for them. These days, we are all asking AI to research tasks, compare options for the best prices and better deals, and decide for us, and so businesses still optimized for the blue-link click are invisible in responses and buried, invisible.

I can attest to this on a personal level and have seen the behavior shift in myself as a marketing expert. For example, I use an AI assistant to do all of my shopping research, comparing options I would like based on my algorithm, and AI does everything for me including the final purchase, without me having to open a million tabs. Why is browsing becoming the exception and not the rule? The pattern becomes to create a laundry list of things I have to do and have AI decide for me and do them. Are we simply becoming lazy or too busy?

In 2026 alone, almost 65 percent of all Google searches end without a click while the average zero-click rate spikes to 83 percent when Google AI overviews appear. Consumers are quickly weaving AI into daily research and buying decisions.

AI Overviews has become our new bestie, they give us the answers before we have a chance to think on the results page. Chatbots don’t even use the results page. But in both cases, the takeaway is that no one will land on your website either way.

So have websites become obsolete in a sea of AI summary – is this the new first impression of you and your business? It seems that way. So let’s say I am searching for the best chef near me, AI will pull up an answer and not a list of links to click through. This means something. What is my takeaway here? “We spent twenty years optimizing for the click, but now that click is dying and the AI answer is becoming everything.”

So what can we do as small businesses to stay afloat amid the sea of AI summaries?

Answer-engine optimization (AEO) is key, so when you create and structure content, make sure you keep asking yourself, how do I structure this so AI can find, trust, and cite it with clear FAQs, direct answers, schema markup, making it easy for people and taking the guesswork out?

The importance of using reviews as training data. AI models depend on third-party reviews and mentions, so you have to build your reputation to be machine-readable, so every review counts, so make sure to ask customers for real reviews that will populate online.

Do great PR and get articles about you and your business online so that you become the business AI recommends so, if AI doesn’t mention you, you don’t exist.

What can you do as a first step? Claim and complete every business profile, publish helpful Q&A content, make your expertise quotable plainly and get yourself in the news by pitching reporters, build a Wikipedia page, create that Google knowledge panel, and you and your business have to show up everywhere.

How can we achieve this goal?

First of all, we use AI agents to support the admin work and as thought leaders to help us find things that we normally wouldn’t have or to speed up the process. Something for research that would have taken us 3 hours may now take us 20 minutes. This helps do more with greater more accuracy. We have AI agents on the team that work as team members, that help us update CRMs, tasks, and keep us accountable as well.

We rebuilt our own operations around this new movement, so we know how to build it for clients too. We show clients what the AI is doing and what it’s producing so that you get an inside look into how it all works and actually understand AI so you can work with it, not against it. I always say, “You can’t sell the future if you’re not living in it.”

So what can we take from all this? The businesses that will win in the next five years aren’t the ones with the prettiest websites. They’re the ones AI trusts enough to recommend. Audit how you show up in AI answers today by asking a chatbot about your category and see who it names. If it isn’t you, that’s your marketing plan.

“Your next customer isn’t Googling you. Make sure the AI knows your name.”

The post Your Next Customer Isn’t Googling You. They’re Asking AI. appeared first on SiteProNews.

In 1998, while working at Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia, Dominique Bastien overheard guests complaining that they couldn’t take pictures through the scratched windows of the resort’s gondolas. At the time, replacing damaged windows was often the only option available to ski resorts, and Bastien wondered whether there was a better solution.

That observation became the starting point for a business she would spend nearly three decades building. What began as a small window restoration operation eventually developed into The Gondola Shop, a specialized company handling complete gondola restorations, custom fabrication, and projects for customers in multiple countries.

Bastien’s entrepreneurial journey is unusual in several respects. She entered a market with few established competitors or technical procedures, developed restoration methods through experimentation, and gradually expanded into services that extended well beyond her original business concept. Along the way, she navigated the challenges of operating in a predominantly male industry, establishing relationships with international manufacturers, and convincing major ski resorts to invest in restoration rather than replacement.

Creating a Market From Scratch

Bastien initially launched Sunshine Polishing with a business partner, concentrating on restoring acrylic and polycarbonate gondola windows. Although polishing plastic surfaces was nothing new, restoring large, curved transportation windows presented challenges that existing techniques did not adequately address.

The work required developing procedures that accounted for surface distortion, heat, pressure, and the durability of the finished product. Bastien and her team experimented with equipment, materials, and techniques until they established methods that could deliver consistent results across entire fleets.

“When you start a business in an industry that barely exists, there is no manual telling you what to do,” Bastien explains. “You have to figure out the technical side, the equipment, the pricing, and then convince customers that what you are offering actually works and is worth the investment.”

Winning customers was particularly challenging because gondolas are passenger transportation systems. Resort operators needed confidence in the quality and reliability of the work before allowing an outside company to restore their equipment.

Bastien also faced the additional challenge of establishing credibility as a woman in a field dominated by men. She recalls having to work harder to demonstrate her technical knowledge and convince prospective customers that her company could handle demanding restoration projects.

In 2006, she became the sole owner of the business, gaining greater freedom to determine its direction and pursue opportunities as they emerged.

As the company grew, Bastien noticed a recurring problem. Customers who hired her to restore scratched windows frequently had gondola cabins with faded paint, deteriorating seats, and damaged hardware. Restoring the windows improved visibility, but the cabins still looked decades old.

Rather than limiting the company to its original specialty, she expanded into painting, upholstery, hardware replacement, fabrication, and eventually complete cabin restoration.

In 2019, Bastien established The Gondola Shop to bring those services together under one business.

One of her most consequential decisions was developing the ability to perform much of the work in-house. Managing multiple contractors for a single restoration could complicate scheduling, quality control, and accountability. By expanding the company’s internal capabilities, she gained greater control over production and customer expectations.

That approach became particularly important as The Gondola Shop began handling larger, multiyear restoration programs. At Breckenridge in Colorado, for example, the company works on a fleet of 111 gondola cabins, with restoration scheduled in smaller groups so the resort can maintain operations.

For Bastien, managing such projects requires considerably more than technical expertise. Transportation, staffing, materials, production schedules, and customer budgets all need to be coordinated, sometimes over several years.

Growing Beyond the Ski Industry

International business opportunities developed largely through relationships rather than a formal expansion strategy.

The ski industry is relatively interconnected, with resort operators, equipment manufacturers, and technical specialists frequently working across countries. As Bastien’s reputation developed, those connections helped introduce her company to new customers and projects.

Working internationally also required adapting to different environmental conditions and business cultures. Gondolas operating in Switzerland face intense ultraviolet exposure, snow, and extreme cold, while equipment in Vietnam encounters heat, humidity, and other environmental challenges.

The business practices were equally varied. Bastien learned that establishing trust with customers in Japan or Europe could require different approaches from those she used in North America.

Her relationships with equipment manufacturers have become another important part of the company’s development. One example is CWA, a Swiss gondola cabin manufacturer within the Doppelmayr Group. After several years of working together, Bastien and the manufacturer have discussed a potential formal partnership to support CWA gondola cabins in North America.

For Bastien, those discussions represent a significant professional milestone.

“When I started almost 30 years ago, I was a small independent business restoring scratched windows,” she recalls. “Today, I am sitting at the table with one of the world’s leading manufacturers discussing how we could work together.”

Bastien has also found opportunities outside the traditional ski resort market by repurposing retired gondola cabins for commercial uses.

At Columbia Sportswear’s headquarters in Portland, Oregon, 10 gondola cabins restored by her company have been installed throughout the office, providing employees with spaces for private conversations, phone calls, and individual work.

Other projects have included converting retired gondolas into food-service cabins, including three used by a customer selling cookies at ski resorts.

These projects introduced the company to customers in hospitality, corporate offices, restaurants, and other industries. They also created a new avenue for growth beyond the seasonal demands of the ski business.

Repurposing gondolas requires considerably more than cosmetic restoration. Each project can involve electrical systems, ventilation, insulation, seating, accessibility considerations, and custom fabrication. Bastien was able to expand into these applications because her company had already developed the technical capabilities necessary to dismantle, restore, and modify existing cabins.

The Business Lessons Behind Nearly Three Decades of Growth

Bastien’s experience offers an example of how a business can develop around a highly specialized service that larger companies have overlooked.

Her early competitors were not necessarily other restoration businesses. In many cases, she was competing against the established practice of replacing damaged equipment. Building a viable alternative required demonstrating that restoration could deliver practical and financial value to resort operators.

As her company expanded, the challenges changed. Bastien had to move beyond handling nearly every aspect of the operation herself and develop a team capable of managing increasingly complex work.

“Today, some of the best improvements come from employees who look at a problem differently than I do,” she says.

The company’s future opportunities reflect the same willingness to adapt that shaped its early growth. Bastien sees continued demand for restoration, fabrication, inspections, and replacement components as ski resorts evaluate the cost of maintaining aging equipment. She is also pursuing opportunities to strengthen relationships with original manufacturers and expand the market for custom gondola applications.

Her entrepreneurial philosophy remains grounded in the practical problem-solving that launched the business. Rather than following a predetermined expansion plan, she allowed customer needs to reveal opportunities for new services, then invested in the capabilities required to deliver them.

“I started with scratched windows and a pretty simple idea in 1998,” Bastien says. “I never imagined it would become what it is today.”

Nearly three decades later, Dominique Bastien has built an international business in a field that offered little established guidance when she entered it. Her experience demonstrates how technical expertise, persistence, and the ability to recognize overlooked commercial opportunities can support the growth of a highly specialized company.

The post How One Entrepreneur Built a Business in an Industry That Barely Existed appeared first on SiteProNews.

When a Fortune 50 client asked us to stand up a full NetSuite ERP environment in under five months, the reaction across most of the program team was predictable. Large enterprise ERP implementations take 6 to 18 months at the low end and often stretch much longer, with average timelines hovering around 14 months and larger multinational programs frequently extending into multi-year initiatives; a five-month window for a Fortune 50 finance function is not an aggressive timeline. It is a different operating model.

We delivered; the system went live on schedule, the close ran inside the new environment in the first month after go-live, and the program closed under budget. I want to share what made that possible, because the failure patterns in this category are well documented and the playbook for compressing them is rarely written down.

The Default Outcome Is a Slip

The numbers on ERP delivery performance are not flattering. Panorama Consulting and other industry researchers consistently report that the majority of ERP projects exceed their original budgets and timelines, with scope expansion and inadequate planning cited as the leading drivers. NetSuite’s own analysis of the broader market puts the first-attempt failure rate at roughly 50 percent, with most implementations running three to four times their original budgets and timelines stretching 30 percent beyond plan.

In my experience leading Finance IMO workstreams on carve-outs, acquisitions, and greenfield ERP rollouts, the slip is almost always visible by the end of the first sprint. The program team simply does not acknowledge it until month four or five. Most Finance IMO projects involve several processes and applications coming together at the same time. In one of my previous engagements, we were tasked with delivering standing up and integrating an architecture that consisted of Salesforce, NetSuite and UKG (HR application). My team had to work with 3rd party vendors that were delivering the Salesforce and UKG portion. Within the first two sprints, I realized that the other teams were taking in scope way beyond what could be accomplished within the given timeframe. Every design decision taken in an upstream application has an impact in the overall design and delivery of an ERP application. I was able to immediately escalate this to the client leadership, and bring all parties together on a call. This resulted in all parties agreeing on a finalized design for go-live, limiting any scope changes, and ensuring no back-end impacts due to changes on the front-end applications.

Where the Time Actually Goes

Conventional ERP program plans are built around sequential workstream dependencies. Requirements gathering hands off to design, design hands off to configuration, configuration hands off to testing. Each handoff carries a buffer, and each buffer assumes that the receiving team will need to revisit decisions the prior team already made. On a 12-month plan, those buffers absorb roughly three months.

We compressed the timeline by re-architecting the governance around parallelism rather than sequence. Chart-of-accounts design ran alongside requirements validation. Integration build started while business process mapping was still being finalized on the workstreams that did not feed those integrations. Cutover planning began in week three, not month four. None of this is novel in the abstract. What makes it work in practice is the cadence of the executive steering committee and the authority granted to the IMO to resolve cross-workstream conflicts in hours, not weeks. With respect to the escalation path, we had a robust system that we had defined. Every issue was given a score between 1-5, with severity of 1 being the highest criticality. We had a set meeting cadence with the IMO committee and the steering committee. We would meet with the IMO committee twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, whereas we would meet with the executive leadership on Fridays. All the issues would be brought up with the IMO committee and a path drafted for resolution on the call. Roughly 90% of the issues were resolved on the call with the IMO committee team members. The issues that were categorized as a Sev 1 or did not have a path to resolution would be brought to the steering committee. This allowed us to funnel only the absolutely critical issues to the leadership team ensuring these issues received the necessary time for attention and discussion. This proved to be extremely efficient in getting the highest priority tickets resolved at the earliest.

Scope Discipline in the First Thirty Days

The most consistent driver of ERP overruns is scope expansion, often introduced in the first month when stakeholders are still framing what the system needs to do. Once a customization request is accepted into the build backlog, removing it costs political capital that program leads rarely want to spend.

The approach that worked on the Fortune 50 engagement was a fit-gap analysis completed inside the first three weeks, with a hard rule that anything classified as a gap had to be solved through process change, manual workaround, or a deferred phase two enhancement. Configuration absorbed the rest. That single rule did more to protect the timeline than any other governance decision we made.

It also forced a harder conversation with business owners than most ERP programs are willing to have. Asking a controller to change a reconciliation process to fit the system, rather than configuring the system to preserve a legacy process, is a conversation that requires executive air cover. Without it, the path of least resistance is customization, and customization is where timelines die. An example of this can be summarized with several of the reporting requirements. Most ERPs require some level of configuration and customization to build complex reports. During our initial sprints, I realized that some of the requirements that were requested as part of reporting would require significant customization. I was able to convince the client leadership team to procure a data warehouse tool and Power BI. This allowed us to send all the necessary data from the ERP over to the data warehouse and manipulate them as required to produce the reports and dashboards. This ensured that not only all the reporting requirements were met on time, but also that the ERP did not need to undergo significant customizations to accommodate this.

Manual Workarounds Are a Feature, Not a Failure

Accelerated implementations require accepting short-term manual workarounds to hit Day 1. The risk is that those workarounds calcify into permanent operating procedures, which is how a successful go-live becomes a finance organization that still runs three offline reconciliations a month two years later.

The discipline that prevents this is a documented post go-live roadmap, agreed before cutover, that schedules the elimination of each workaround on a defined timeline. On the NetSuite engagement, every workaround had a sunset date and an owner. The steering committee reviewed the list quarterly for the first year.

What This Means for CFOs

The CFOs I work with are not looking for a faster ERP timeline as an end in itself. They are looking for synergy capture in a carve-out, Day 1 readiness in an acquisition, or relief from a legacy system that is constraining the finance organization’s ability to support the business. Timeline compression matters because every additional month of program runtime carries real cost, in consulting fees, in delayed synergy realization, and in finance team bandwidth diverted from operational priorities.

The right question for a CFO scoping an ERP program is not whether it can be done in five months. Most cannot, and most should not be. The right question is whether the program’s governance model is designed for the parallelism, scope discipline, and decision velocity that the target timeline actually requires. When those three elements are in place, the timeline follows, but if they are not, no amount of additional resourcing closes the gap

The post How a Fortune 50 Client Got a NetSuite ERP Live in Under Five Months appeared first on SiteProNews.

Consumers believe they compare brands.

Sometimes they do. But much of the work begins before conscious comparison. The nonconscious mind recognizes sensory cues, retrieves memories, anticipates outcomes, detects social meaning, and asks a brutally efficient question:

Which choice feels most right, most quickly?

A brand, therefore, is not the logo printed on the package. It is the constellation of meaning retrieved when that logo appears.

That constellation is brand essence: form, function, feelings, values, benefits, metaphors, and extensions. Benefits themselves can be functional, emotional, and social. Add one final requirement — coherence across the whole system — and we have eight reasons why one brand defeats another.

1. Form: The brain chooses what it can recognize

Before consumers understand a brand, they encounter its physical qualities: its feel, shape, color, sound, movement.

Owala’s FreeSip bottle illustrates the power that form has. Its recognizable lid and dual-purpose spout allow users either to sip through a straw or drink through a wider opening. The design received a 2025 Red Dot Award. In a category filled with nearly identical cylinders, Owala created a silhouette the brain could retrieve.  

The bottle holds water. The form holds memory. The distinctive brand assets become the very visible face of the brand in the nonconscious mind.

A distinctive form turns recognition into a tiny monopoly.

Before the consumer reads the brand, the Form has already voted.

2. Function: Our brain chooses the brand that owns a behavior

Function is not a list of features. It is the indispensable role that the brand plays in daily life.

Duolingo does not merely provide language lessons. Learning and perfecting a foreign language becomes a repeatable daily behavior through short lessons, gamification, reminders, and streaks. The company surpassed 50 million daily active users in 2025.  

The lesson teaches. The streak returns.

A competitor can reproduce vocabulary exercises. It is harder to replace the ritual that has formed around them.

The strongest brand does not merely own a capability. It owns a behavior, and the ritual behind it.

3. Feelings: The brain chooses an emotional climate

Feelings are not superfluous layers added to a product after the practical work is finished. They help the brain decide what actually matters most.

Spotify Wrapped transforms ordinary listening data into nostalgia, surprise, amusement, pride, and self-recognition. Its 2025 experience again converted personal listening histories into stories designed to be revisited and shared.  

Apple Music can also count songs. Spotify makes this feel like a portrait.

The data says, “This is what you played.” The brand says, “This is who you were.”

Consumers frequently choose the brand that gives an ordinary activity the most emotional resonance.

Customers pick brands that take them to vivid emotional landscapes.

4. Values: The brain chooses what the purchase endorses

Every purchase is also a small vote.

Dove has spent more than two decades positioning itself around “Real Beauty.” In 2024, Dove extended that position by committing not to use AI-generated imagery in place of real women in its advertising.

The body wash is just an object. The deeper choice concerns what kind of beauty deserves to be seen.

Values become influential when consumers can observe them in decisions, representations, policies, products, and refusals. A fashionable statement is not a value; it is copy.

Values are not what a brand says when the cameras are running. They are what the brand refuses to do when nobody requires the refusal.

5. Benefits: Things about me

Function answers, “What does it do?” Benefit answers, “What does that say about me to others?”

e.l.f. Beauty’s practical promise is unusually clear: contemporary cosmetics without prestige-brand economics. As of early 2026, approximately 75% of its products remained priced at $10 or less, while quarterly sales rose 38%.  

The function is makeup. The benefit is getting to experiment, rocking a look, or showing everyone the superstar you truly are.

Consumers rarely purchase the mechanism for its own sake. They purchase the inconvenience removed, the time saved, the money preserved, or the task completed — and most importantly, the appearance projected.

Features describe the product. The benefits describe how a consumer’s perception by the world has changed.

6. Metaphors: The brain chooses the larger story

Strong brands are organized around an idea that means more than the product itself. It is the message we deliver to ourselves through the brand.

Nike’s 2024 “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” campaign did not lead with cushioning, fabric, or sole construction. It returned to Nike’s deeper metaphor: the athlete as a relentless competitor. The company framed winning not as an accidental outcome, but as a consuming human ambition.  

Nike sells shoes. The use of Nike by the consumer tells them that they are disciplined. But the shoes borrow meaning from the arena, the struggle, the sacrifice, and the victory.

A metaphor is an example of cognitive compression. It allows something small to carry a very large human story and communicate the message to oneself. A shoe becomes more valuable when it can stand for the person running inside it.

7. Extensions: The brain chooses the new from a trusted source

The consumer’s brain gives some brands permission to travel.

An example can be seen in Apple’s move from personal audio into hearing support. The FDA authorized the first over-the-counter hearing-aid software designed for compatible AirPods Pro in 2024.  

The extension felt natural because Apple already occupied several relevant territories:

• Personal audio
• Miniaturized technology
• Wearable design
• Software integration
• Discreet everyday devices

Apple was not asking consumers to build an entirely new mental model. It was asking them to extend an existing one. Anytime a brand uses “i-Whatever”, it basically usurps Apple’s brand halo to advance itself.

A weak extension says, “We found another market.” A natural extension says, “Of course this brand can do that.”

8. Core Essence: Our brains choose the brand whose parts agree

The final reason is not an eighth dimension. It is the coherence of all previous seven.

Costco’s warehouse environment, pallets, membership model, limited assortment, private label, and pricing discipline all reinforce one core essence: intelligent value without unnecessary theater.

Costco explicitly describes its model as offering low prices on a small selection of national and private-label products. In fiscal 2025, it had more than 145 million cardholders and a worldwide membership renewal rate of approximately 90%.  

The warehouse looks economical. The assortment feels edited. The membership implies privileged access. Kirkland signals value without embarrassment.

These pieces together tell the same story. When every cue agrees, the consumer does not have to solve the brand.

The brand that connects first

Consumers rarely decide which brand is best because of a single claim.

• Form opens the memory.
• Function establishes relevance.
• Feelings create priority.
• Values grant moral permission.
• Benefits answer, “What happens to me?”
• Metaphors answer, “What larger idea does this represent?”
• Extensions reveal how far the promise can travel.
• Core Essence binds the system into one retrievable meaning.

Brands often lose because they communicate too many disconnected things. The packaging says one thing. Advertising says another. The experience says something worse. The consumer does not reject the argument.

No stable brand arrives in the mind in time to be chosen. The winning brand is not always the brand consumers know the most about. It is the brand their brain knows what to do with.

The post The Science Behind Why Consumers Choose One Brand Over Another appeared first on SiteProNews.