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Episode 173

Creating Future Demand with James Hurman

84% of the time, buyers choose a brand that was already on their radar before they ever started shopping. So why do so many marketing budgets only chase the people ready to buy today?

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob talk with brand strategist and author James Hurman about his new book, Future Demand. James breaks down why brands hit a growth ceiling when they lean too hard on performance marketing. He also explains why feelings outlast facts in memory, and why that changes which channels deserve your investment. Marketers will leave with a clearer case for building demand among tomorrow's customers, not just converting today's.

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Topics Covered

• [05:00] Defining current demand versus future demand

• [07:00] Splitting budgets 50/50 between brand and performance

• [12:00] Why American marketers lag on brand-building principles

• [18:00] Measuring future demand through brand tracking

• [22:00] Why feelings outlast facts in memory

• [26:00] The case for creativity in earning attention

• [35:00] James's own future demand brand: Land Rover

Resources:

2021 WARC White Paper

2026 Future Demand Book

James Hurman's LinkedIn

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

CMO

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

James Hurman

Author and Advertising Expert

Transcript

Elena: I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect at Misfits & Machines.

Angela: Hello there.

Rob: Hello?

Elena: And we have a guest today. James Hurman is a brand strategist, entrepreneur, and author based in Auckland, New Zealand. He's the founder of Previously Unavailable, a venture company that creates and invests in new businesses, and co-founder of Tracksuit, a brand tracking platform operating across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the US.

He also created the Master of Advertising Effectiveness, a program teaching marketers the evidence-based principles of advertising effectiveness. James has written two books, "The Case for Creativity," on the data showing that more creative businesses are more successful, and an upcoming book that you can download now, but it's coming out in print in August, which is called "Future Demand," on why building your brand among tomorrow's customers is key to long-term growth.

So James, thanks for joining us.

James: Yeah, welcome, and hello from London. Whenever someone introduces me, I tend to feel a bit exhausted after all of that.

Rob: Well, let me make you even more exhausted, because you didn't mention that in 2013 you were literally named the number one strategic planner on the planet. That sounds pretty amazing on a resume. But even more interesting, okay, you've done a lot of unexpected things. I mean, in terms of writing advertising effectiveness books, co-founding a whole company, but you also wrote a children's book about luck. Can you talk a little bit about that before we get into the ad stuff?

James: Yeah, that was a really interesting project. So I read this book called "The Luck Factor" by a guy called Richard Wiseman, a British psychology professor. He studies lucky people and unlucky people, and he wrote a book on how you can be more lucky. And I read it and I was in my 30s and I was like, "This is awesome, but I'm kind of a grown-up now.

I'm set in my ways. Wouldn't it be great if we taught these principles of luck to little kids?" Like how, what better thing could you teach a little kid than how to be lucky? And so I kinda turned that into a kids book, launched it on Kickstarter and sold a bunch of copies, had a lot of fun in the process, and it's really nice.

Every now and then I get a, you know, some grown-up comes up to me and says, "Oh, I read my kid your story every night," and it makes me feel very warm inside.

Rob: Well, if you wanna check it out, it's called The Boy and the Lemon.

Angela: Adding to cart.

Elena: Maybe some future marketers will read that. You're investing in future audience, so there you go. Well, I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do, with some research, and no surprise, I chose a piece from our guest. A few years ago, WARC published a white paper called "Rethinking Brand for the Rise of Digital Commerce," and James wrote the lead analysis in it.

Within the paper, he argued that the whole industry has taken the wrong lesson from big digital disruptor brands. We watched them grow fast on performance marketing and assumed that brand building was becoming obsolete. But he argued that without brand, those companies eventually hit what he called a demand ceiling that restricts their growth.

We should think of brand as creating future demand, making sure the customers who will buy from you down the road already know you and feel good about you before they're in market. You have to create future demand at the same time that you're capturing existing demand, and when those two things happen at once, growth is sustainable and sustained over time.

So James, thanks again for joining us. Let's start with the idea of future demand, which is a concept you must feel strongly about because you are turning it into a book, or have turned it into a book. What are the mistakes that you notice marketers making that cause you to advance the ideas behind future demand?

James: I do believe in it reasonably strongly, and where it started from, that paper was kind of the genesis of the idea. So the folks at WARC were talking to me about how to convince these more modern companies — in that particular case it was e-commerce retailers who've kind of grown up with digital marketing — how do we convince them that brand is important?

I'd looked at the companies that we're investing in via my company in New Zealand, and the startup world in general. There was this real pattern that a startup would start, they'd grow really fast, and then after about three years that would plateau off, and they weren't seeing the same low cost of acquisition and high growth.

New customers were becoming more and more difficult and more and more expensive to find, and so I really dug into kind of what was causing that, and that was where the sort of realization came that at any point in time there's only a certain amount of people in the market, and once you've sort of exhausted that group of people, it becomes very difficult to find more of those people if you haven't done the sort of much more broad-based kind of broadcast marketing that reaches big groups of people and kind of turned them on to your brand before they come into the market.

I'll give you a kind of simple example of what I mean by current and future demand. So, when I speak at conferences, I always do this thing where I say to the audience, "I want you to put your hand up if you're in the market for a new smartphone right now, like you're in the process of buying a new smartphone, or you're gonna buy a new smartphone in the next couple of weeks."

And always a couple of people put up their hand. And then I say, "Okay, now I want you to put your hand up if you think you're gonna buy a new smartphone over the next two years." And almost everyone puts up their hand. And I do that experiment to show this really simple kind of point: that in any market there's two types of demand. There's what I call current demand, which is the two people that put up their hand. That's people who are in the market ready to buy right now. And there's what I call future demand, which is all the other people that put up their hand — those people who are not in the market right now, but who are definitely gonna come into the market at some point over the next few months or years or whatever it might be.

So, this is how markets work. It doesn't matter what category you look at, there's always a small group in market and a much larger group out of market. Now, we can convert that small group in market with our performance marketing, but that big group who's out of market — I'm not gonna get someone who's just bought a new smartphone to buy another one today, right?

Doesn't matter how good my ad is, that's just not gonna happen. People flow in and out of markets in quite a natural, organic kind of way. And so our job as marketers is to make sure the maximum number of people come into the market feeling good about our brand, feeling familiar with our brand, it being kind of top of mind, so that when we hit them with our performance marketing, they're more likely to respond to that performance marketing, buy our product.

And then once people are in market, of course, the main job that we've gotta do as a brand is just get as many of them as possible to choose us and not the other brands. But if the other brands around us have done a better job of priming those folks before they come into the category, we're gonna find it harder than those brands to convert those folks.

So hopefully that's a kind of a quick summary of what I mean by future demand and current demand.

Elena: Yeah. The iPhone example is a great one, and I think hearing you talk about it the way you've advanced it, it makes so much sense. But it's so easy for marketers to get stuck in sort of the digital doom loop. Seems like it's easier to think about the short term, to invest in performance marketing, and so many marketers do hit that ceiling.

So I was curious — you've worked with marketers all around the world. What have you seen the best marketers doing to take these concepts and, like, practically apply them in their marketing? What actions are they taking that's different from those more performance, short-term, sort of trapped marketers?

James: I mean, number one, I think it's the allocation of investment. And so if we think about, you know, how much we spend on brand marketing, how much we spend on performance marketing — and what I mean by brand marketing is much more broad reach, much more creative, much more emotional marketing.

It's marketing that is really designed to engage people rather than just communicate facts at them. And so what we see in the data, and we've now got several very strong data points over many, many years, is that the companies that spend about half and half on brand and performance are the companies that see the best overall marketing ROI.

So I don't mean ROAS on a particular ad, I mean if you take all of the marketing and advertising activity a company does, all that they spend on that, all of the incremental sales that they get back in from doing that — that's total marketing ROI. That's the number we should really be thinking about as a business.

The companies that achieve the best overall marketing ROI spend about half and half on performance and brand. Now, we live in a world where, like, actually there's not that many companies that spend half and half — most spend most of their budgets on performance marketing, right? They lean right into performance marketing, and the data is very clear that you will see a lower overall marketing ROI if you do that.

Because performance marketing generates visible, kind of measurable, immediate sales, we tend to believe — and particularly the non-marketing stakeholders around us tend to believe — that that's the right thing to be doing. That's the most kind of responsible place to be putting our budget, what we can see a return from, because what if that brand stuff's not working?

Now, of course, the brand stuff is working, it's just that we can't see it show up in the data so much because we're marketing to a group of people that aren't in the market just yet, so they don't show up in today's sales data. Does that mean we should stop marketing to them? Well, only if we don't want them to buy from us in future.

So I think that's the first thing that a good marketing function or a good CMO will do — just kind of make sure they're allocating about half of their budget to each of those two jobs. That's a really important thing. The second thing: I think the best CMOs that I've worked with are very good at marketing marketing.

What I mean by that — so Dara Treseder, who's a CMO at Autodesk at the moment, told me a few years ago, she said, "James, marketing has not done a very good job of marketing marketing." And it's a wonderful little set of words, very pithy. She was also absolutely right. We've done a great job of marketing the products and the brands in our care, but we haven't done as good a job of marketing our discipline — how it works, why it works this way, what we need to do to make it work better.

So we're forever fighting these fires with non-marketing stakeholders, whether that's our CEO, our CFO, our board, whoever we've got around us. We're trying to get them to allow us to do creative, emotional stuff and to invest in brand, and it's a really hard argument 'cause they're going, "No, I just want you to drive sales tomorrow."

And so it's kind of about taking this information that I write about in the book. We've now got 20 years of really, really strong marketing science and marketing effectiveness research, and we need to communicate that to the non-marketing stakeholders around us so they're not confused about why we're trying to do this stuff that seems sort of weird — creative, emotional marketing that doesn't seem to show up in the sales results tomorrow.

So we need to do a better job of that. And then the third thing is: marketers, because they know that they really lean into creativity and emotion on the brand side, they're not just trying to make a kind of rational product ad and then put it in media that reaches heaps of people.

They're really disciplined about saying, "No, we're gonna try and make an ad that earns the attention of lots of people because it's really creative, it's enjoyable to watch, and it sticks in people's memories because it's really emotional." We remember feelings far longer than we remember facts.

And so the question is: How creative is this? How emotional is this? How memorable is this? It's not "how well is this communicating the facts?" On the other side of the business — the performance side — they're really disciplined about that being the place for the facts.

That's the place to tell our story about why our thing is better, you know, what are its benefits, how much does it cost, and where can I get it from? All that stuff that's really important on the performance side — they should be doing that. But a disciplined marketer will be disciplined about doing those two jobs quite separately, because they're two very different jobs to do. So those are the things I think a really good CMO knows and does.

Angela: James, I don't know if you've seen this in your data too, but one of the things we often talk about on the podcast is just the US being a bit behind in terms of their understanding, knowledge of the foundational principles that actually drive growth for brands. That was the impetus of the podcast, actually — that's why we started it.

There's establishing the baseline knowledge, and then I think there's the say-do gap, where there are a lot of marketers that I think foundationally understand maybe what drives growth. They've read enough. They've been exposed to yourself or Mark Ritson or the IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass, but have a hard time converting their current culture and practice over to this balance. You talk about the split of current versus future, or what should be put into sales activation investment, short term, versus brand and long term. So what do you typically see as some of the biggest obstacles to making those changes, and what advice would you have for brands trying to go in that direction?

James: Yeah, it's a great question. I think let me answer it in two steps. So the first thing… a lot of the marketing science and effectiveness research has come out of the UK, and I think, culturally, British people are quite biased towards thinking and intellectualizing and discussing things.

In America, what I see is you all are quite biased toward action — you like to get shit done, right? The way that some of the marketing effectiveness stuff has been communicated has been a little academic, right? And that's not necessarily the most consumable for an American audience because you are sort of biased towards action.

You wanna know quickly what it is and how to get it done, which is a great quality, right? And so I think, firstly, so much of the work that I'm doing is sort of starting with, okay, how do we take this great stuff that's been done in the UK or in Australia or these other parts of the world?

How do we take the great sort of academic stuff that's happened? How do we start to put that into language, framing, and mental models that's actually really easy for people to pick up and use, rather than expecting that an American marketer is gonna wanna wade through the papers and the research and the academia and all that kind of stuff.

So I think it's on us as a marketing effectiveness community to communicate what we're doing in a really effective way, so American marketers can go, "Okay, I get that. Now I understand how to apply it." So that's a big part of what I'm trying to do. The second part of your question is that say-do gap — if you do understand this stuff, it's very hard to get done sometimes.

And this comes back to the marketing of marketing, the non-stakeholder issue that we have. And I think right now that non-stakeholders are kind of the biggest challenge that we have in marketing, and communicating to them is becoming increasingly important. So I'm doing a couple of things.

One of the things that I'm doing is related to what I just said. It's like, how do we put this stuff into frameworks and mental models and language that can be not only easily understood by marketers, but actually easily communicated on to their non-marketing stakeholders? I think if you understand the principle of excess share of voice and, you know, you have deep knowledge of category entry points and blah, blah, blah, right — that's not often super easy to then pass on to a CFO, or talk about that stuff in a way that makes sense. Whereas what I've found is that the idea of the future demand framing is it's actually quite easy to talk to a CFO or a CEO or a board or an engineering team or your legal partners or whoever, and they get that really quickly.

You say to those folks, "Do you want great brand building?" And they're like, "Uh, I don't know. Maybe?" But you say to them, "Do you want future demand?" And they're like, "Well, yes, of course we want that." Right? And so it's kind of a framing that enables marketers to better pass that on to their non-marketing stakeholders.

And then the third thing that I'm doing is playbooks. So I've got a friend, Laura Jones — she's the CMO of Instacart. She's done an amazing job over the past four or five years at transforming that organization from 100% performance into a balance of brand and performance. She's turned it into one of the best brand builders in Silicon Valley.

She's worked inside an environment that's a tech environment in the Valley. They're very numbers based. They're not very friendly towards brand historically, but she's managed to turn that around. She's managed to lead a conversation with her CEO, her CFO, and her board that has enabled her to buy the right to do the kind of work that's really grown the business.

And there are other marketers around who have done the same thing. So what I'm doing with those folks is I'm creating playbooks — digging into what exactly did they do, what were the steps they took with those stakeholders that allowed those stakeholders to believe in what they were doing.

So one of those is in the book — that's the case study with Laura. And then I've got another one coming out from a massive telco in Australia. And I'll keep doing these over time, because I think what marketers are sort of crying out for is, "Okay, this is great, but how do I do it?"

And so the lessons that other CMOs have learned about how you have these non-marketing stakeholder conversations, how you take the business on the right journey — I think those are just so instructive and so important for other marketers to kind of learn from and follow. You can learn all the theory, but it's like, okay, right now, how do I put it into practice? How do I learn from those who have cracked that nut? 'Cause it's a hard one to crack, but once you do, it unlocks so much value.

Rob: My family's credit card statement would agree with Instacart's success — they're doing a great job.

James: Oh, yeah.

Angela: I also feel like when we think about that intellectual belief system in marketing effectiveness that seems to permeate out of the UK and Australia — in the US it feels like we're very obsessed with data, and actually specifically our own data. There's a ton of data that supports that brand drives growth and you need balance, but we get very obsessed with that short-term data, and measurement is just a big problem as we try to close that say-do gap.

Tracksuit, right, is a platform that helps with that classic "brand is hard to measure" problem, and the void constantly kills that brand investment. So how do you actually measure future demand without sliding right back into these short-term proxies that cause the problem in the first place? I would imagine that CMOs need some help in trying to evangelize with the CEO, with the CFO, and need some leading indicators that we're going in the right direction. So I'd love to just hear more about that.

James: Basically, you've got metrics which tell you how well you're converting the current demand in the market. So all your performance metrics do that brilliantly, right? Really great. Those are excellent metrics to use to understand whether we're converting the demand that's in market in the most efficient way possible.

So that's great. But it's a totally different set of metrics you need to understand whether you're building future demand, because those folks that you are marketing to, they're not in the market just yet, and so they don't show up in the sales data at all, right? And so there's no way that that can give you a glimpse of that.

So really you go back to brand tracking. You go back to, you know, are we building awareness over time? Are more people becoming familiar with us and our brand? We have a familiarity bias, so we bias towards things that we're more familiar with. I really like this brand Coca-Cola. I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but it's a brand that I really like.

Coca-Cola have done just an incredible job of maintaining clear market leadership in a category that has a very low price of entry, is highly competitive, right? And for decades and decades and decades. Why have they done that? Well, part of it is that the product's really good. Coke is a really nice tasting drink.

But guess what? There are a lot of other nice tasting drinks out there, folks. So what Coke have also done is — you know how they put their logo on like every convenience store in the world? You can't even walk through a city basically without seeing a Coke logo. That's what I call familiarity infrastructure, right? They make sure that we are never not familiar with Coca-Cola, right? They are just so good at doing that. Can you measure exactly what that sign on the front of that convenience store has done for sales?

Well, you can try, but good luck with that. They've really done that job of keeping familiarity really, really high. And so brand awareness is like a proxy for that — like, how many people are aware of our brand? We need to keep ourselves familiar. And consideration: like, how many people would consider buying from us? Have we done a good job of, you know, making people like us enough, frankly, to decide that they wanna buy from us.

And what we now know is that when someone comes into a market, yeah, 84% of the time, that person will buy something from a brand that was on their consideration set before they came into the market. So are we driving that consideration up? Are we on that consideration set? So brand tracking helps us understand that.

Where's our brand awareness at versus our competitors? Where's our consideration at versus our competitors? Where's our preference? What do people associate with us? What do they feel towards us? What do they think of us? That's a really important set which gives us a glimpse into the future. It tells us, of those folks that are gonna come into the category at some point in the future, how do they feel about us?

'Cause if they're not familiar with us, and they don't consider us, we're really unlikely to put an ad in front of them that's gonna lead to a sale. So we need to have both of these things side by side, right? Two dashboards: one for our performance, current demand; one for our brand, future demand.

Tracksuit — you mentioned it before — so Tracksuit's one way of doing that. I'm not gonna get real salesy about Tracksuit, but basically the idea with Tracksuit was, how do we make our brand tracking more like an always-on dashboard, just like your performance dashboard, and how do we make it vastly more cost-effective?

It's very expensive in the traditional way, and we wanted more brands — particularly the smaller, growing brands — to be able to have access to this sort of research and data. And so, we ought to be obsessed with data. We ought to be looking at the data and let that guide us.

But if we've only got one half of the data, right — if we're blind to the whole other half of it, then are we gonna make great decisions? Probably not.

Angela: Let's talk a little bit about channel strategy. You've long been a believer in broad reach video, and we're obviously a TV agency, so we're a little bit biased here. But from a pure media standpoint, what do you think makes TV so well-suited to creating that future demand specifically, versus just harvesting the demand that already exists?

James: TV — the reason that it has been so effective and continues to be so effective is, if you think about what I was saying before, right — if we wanna create future demand, we've gotta use creativity to earn the attention of people who aren't in the market yet and therefore don't care much about our category.

And we need to leave them with positive memories of us, and so we need to make them feel something. And let me dig into that just a little bit so everyone understands that. We store facts and feelings in our brain in two different places. Our facts are stored in a part of our memory called explicit memory.

Explicit memory decays very fast. What that means is we forget stuff stored in that memory really quickly. So that's where all the facts go. If you tell people your features and your benefits and all this fact stuff, it goes into their explicit memory. It doesn't sit there for long. It kind of fades really quickly over time.

Emotions, they're stored in our implicit memory. Our implicit memory has a very low decay rate. It means that we remember feelings for a really long time, right? And so Maya Angelou said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget the way you made them feel."

We all know that to be true because we're humans, right? That is true. But it's backed up by the science, and it's true for brands as it is for people, right? We remember feelings a long time. So if we're talking to someone who's gonna come into our category in six weeks or three months or eight months' time, and we give them some facts, they will almost certainly have forgotten those when they come into the category.

If we give them some feelings, they almost certainly will remember those feelings when they come into the category. Now, what television always enabled us to do was — it's great for creativity. We can do really creative things on television, and we can do really emotional things. We've got sight and sound.

We can combine those things in ways that make us feel things, right? Whether that's really happy or really emotional or really kind of inspired, whatever it is. It's much easier to do that in a television commercial than it is on a little ad that kind of rushes through your feed on your social networks, right?

So that's why TV is a great canvas for creativity and emotion. That's why it's really useful. It's also, you know, historically had very, very large audiences, reached lots of people, and when we're creating future demand, we need to reach those massive groups of people who are not yet in the market for what we've got to sell.

Now, over time, TV viewership has declined. TV viewership is still really high — it would surprise anyone; it surprises me every time we look at the data. It's still really high. It's not as high as it used to be, but it's still a very good part of the mix. And things like YouTube — if it's a longer format, unskippable YouTube delivered over connected television — that also has that same sort of effect: reaches lots of people, is a really nice video format to communicate creatively and emotionally.

And so I think that's the reason why — you know — I continue to make the case for video, because it just enables us to do the things that are best at creating future demand. Does that mean we can't do those things in social or other forms of digital media? No, it doesn't.

It's just much, much more difficult to do in those arenas. And I think some of the other sort of more traditional broadcast media — whether it's outdoor, whether it's radio — they again give us these bigger, longer canvases to do things that are more likely to really make people feel things and allow us to do more creative stuff.

So that's why I sort of advocate for those. They're not the whole game. Of course, we should be using the algos and the retail media platforms and all of that for our current demand conversion — absolutely. But we look at the total mix, and when we need to do that future demand job really well, then doing it on those sorts of canvases is much better than trying to do it on a social feed.

Rob: I really love your coining of the term "familiarity infrastructure" — I'm gonna steal that shamelessly and put it in my pocket for future use. That obviously plays into creative, right? And — how do we become familiar? We can become familiar with creative. And in your first book, you made the case that more creative businesses are more successful. Why is that? Why is creativity so powerful, and where has the marketing industry really gone wrong in the ways that it has invested in it effectively?

James: So let's pick that off in a couple of ways, 'cause I think "why is creativity important for business" is a slightly different question, before we get into the sort of advertising and marketing part of things. Who was it? Was it Drucker that said, you know, businesses have really two functions: marketing and innovation?

And innovation is such a critical function because we want an organization to grow — increasing its kind of surface area of ability to sell is really important. That's why, you know, you don't find a car brand that just has one model, or you don't find a car brand that's making the exact same car as they made 20 years ago, right?

The innovation that goes into creating new models and updating the models, and making them ever more comfortable and safe and nice to drive and all that kind of stuff, is really critical. So all of that takes human creativity, right? Those are all creative acts — the creating of new things that are more desirable than the old things were, and creating many, many of them so our company grows.

So that's fundamentally why creativity is important to business from a growth point of view. You know, creativity is also important to business from a kind of efficiency point of view. So, reducing our costs, reducing the amount of effort or money that it takes us to do things — humans find unbelievably creative ways to kind of keep doing that.

So creativity is important to business in that sense. Why is creativity important to marketing and advertising? It comes back to that fact that most people aren't paying a lot of attention to advertising. Say you're one of the two people that put your hand up to say you were buying a smartphone, you know, in the next couple of weeks.

If you saw, right, a side-by-side comparison of an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy, and it was just functional information — all their features and benefits and where you can buy it from and how much it costs and what this reviewer has said and that reviewer, and the star ratings and all of that functional stuff — if you're in the market for a smartphone, you're probably gonna stop and read that. You're really interested. You wanna make the right decision. You're about to make that decision. You would sit and read that. If you're not in the market for a smartphone yet, there's a very, very low chance, unless you're weirdly interested in mobile phones, that you would stop and read that information. In fact, we would mostly just filter it out because it's not relevant to us. So it comes back to this idea that, for most people in a market, they need creativity to earn their attention.

I'll give you another example. I bet you're not in the market for buying a commercial truck right now. Some folks might be, I don't know — I've never actually met anyone, when I've been doing my talks to marketers, that's in the market for a commercial truck. But everyone watched Jean-Claude Van Damme do the splits over two reversing Volvo trucks with INXS playing in the background, right?

We all did. Why did we do that? Completely irrational — we're never gonna buy a commercial truck. Total waste of 60 seconds of our time, but we all watched it. Why did we watch it? Because the creativity of it earned our interest. It earned our attention. It made us watch it even though it was not fundamentally relevant to us in a rational sense.

And it also earned the attention of all the people who would come into the commercial truck market over the next 10 years. They'd all remember seeing that ad, right? So I think that's really kind of the case for creativity in advertising and marketing: we've got a lot of people we've got to talk to who are not yet fundamentally interested in our category.

They're not yet in the market, and we can't earn their attention with a list of facts about our product. They don't care. They're not gonna look at that. They're not gonna read it. They're not gonna remember it. So we've got to use creativity — the art of doing original, engaging, beautifully crafted things — to earn the attention of all those folks that we want to be our future customers, and that the business needs as future customers. That's really what creativity's all about.

Rob: Jean-Claude Van Damme, that was a good ad, right?

James: Jean-Claude Van Damme, right.

Rob: Absolutely. I stole that from Fresh Prince. He used to say, "Jean-Claude Van Damme, I'm fine." That was really cool, and that was a good ad. Are we getting better? You know, if you just look at the whole — we spend a lot of time thinking about marketing effectiveness, and you've really done your service to the community with all of your studies, your products, and your training. Do you think the overall discipline is actually getting better when it comes to marketing effectiveness?

James: There's that quote — was it Asimov or someone who said, "The future's here, it's just not evenly distributed"? And I think that's the same in marketing. You know, I know of a lot of companies that have taken this knowledge and used it to vastly improve the value of their organizations, and I know of a lot that haven't, right?

And so I think we have improved in pockets, but there are some big forces against us, right — big forces preventing us from doing that. There's a big knowledge gap. There's still not enough people who really understand this stuff. I'm trying to change that. We've got a sort of translation gap.

There are people that have heard the headlines but haven't really wanted to dig into the academic papers and all the rest of it, so we need to translate this stuff better. That's what I'm trying to do. So even though we've had a lot of this stuff for a few years, it hasn't been translated in a way that really hits.

So yeah, there's a knowledge gap, there's a translation gap, there's a non-marketing stakeholder gap. Non-marketing stakeholders are still operating on this kind of mental model that advertising works by causing people to buy things, by persuading people to go out and buy products.

It doesn't work in that way. We think it does, but advertising actually doesn't cause sales — it does ensure that brands win a greater share of sales, which is obviously incredibly valuable to a business. But I think because we're caught in this kind of incorrect mental model of how advertising works, most non-marketing stakeholders kind of go, "Well, that's how marketing works, and that's how we should measure it, and that's how we should figure out whether it has worked.

And also, shouldn't we spend less on marketing and just make it more efficient? Shouldn't we do that?" And so these ideas, which I think permeate the business world, need to sort of be challenged — but again, in a way that respects the fact that it's on us to communicate these things in the right way and educate the community around us, in the right way, to make sure that they understand the way that marketing and advertising really work.

They need to understand that marketing and advertising are investments. They're not operating costs, even though we can't capitalize them on our balance sheet. They are actually more like capital investments than they are like operational costs. And so, no, we shouldn't try and reduce them and make them more efficient like we do with all of our other OPEX.

We should treat them like investments. And if you've got an investment that returns $4 in profit for every dollar invested over two years, right, you would normally pour as much money as humanly possible into that investment — you wouldn't try and skimp on it. So, there's all of those sorts of things that we need to get better at communicating to the finance community about how the returns of advertising actually show up, when they show up, and how big they are.

We've got a ton of work to do yet. The field of marketing science and advertising effectiveness — marketing science had been around since probably the 1950s or something like that, but up until about 2008 or something like that, most of it was hidden away in journals that, frankly, no one read, right?

No marketers, nobody read them. And so, as a discipline, it's only really been publicly visible for about 20 years. That makes it a pretty nascent discipline in the grand scheme of things, right? If you invent a new academic discipline and it's only 20 years old, it probably hasn't found its way out into most of the world, and it's not going to for a few years yet.

We're still sort of at the beginning of the journey. So, coming back to your question: have we got better? Yes, in pockets we have. In other, larger pockets, we've got a lot more work to do. It's quite natural that we've got more work to do, 'cause it's quite a young discipline. So, let's get out and do it.

Rob: Let's get out and do it. I'm from America. I love me some America, but I want you to be straight, straight with us Americans here. You've operated across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and, of course, the US. Does the US kinda suck when it comes to just being overly focused on short-termism and performance obsession? Like, how do we compare to some of those other countries that you work with? Or, on the flip side, are we awesome?

James: I think I'll go back to, again — the American culture has a real bias towards action, and a real bias towards seeing results quickly from all that action. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing inherently, per se, it's not a bad thing. I also think that most of the rest of the world is pretty short-term oriented as well.

Like, to be fair, it's not like in the UK the analysts are saying to the boards of the companies, "We want you to go really slow," you know? They're also — everyone else is obsessed with short-termism as well. I think it's perhaps accentuated a little bit in the US.

But no, you don't suck. I think you're really, really good at all sorts of forms of marketing, right? Like, really world-leading in all sorts of stuff — just epic business builders. So I think it's kind of like — taking that really great foundational base and just going, "Right, there's even more that you could do to be even more awesome," as opposed to approaching it from a point of view that you're sort of getting it wrong somehow. There's a lot to learn. There's a lot that the rest of the world can learn from America, and there's a lot that America can learn from the rest of the world. And so I think, yeah, we should approach it from that point of view and just kind of share more and figure out how we all get more awesome together.

Elena: Love that. That's why we like having people from different countries on the podcast too, because we have a mostly US listenership, but it's nice to hear opinions from different places in the world. This has been wonderful. We have just a fun wrap-up question for you here, which is: what's a brand that you were a future customer of for years? So you loved it, you were aware of it years before you actually bought it.

James: Probably Land Rover. Cars are a really easy one, right? You know, it takes a while before you can afford the car that you actually want. But yeah, there's something about — I have a Land Rover Defender. I bought it last year, brand new, and I got to spec it out and do all of that yummy stuff, and I really love that.

For years I kind of saw lovely ads which kind of made Land Rover seem like this — I mean, one of their cars is called a Discovery, but it kind of evoked discovery, right? Going out into the world and being sort of at one with nature, and getting to places that you couldn't get to, you know, if you were just driving a Toyota or something like that.

And so that always really spoke to me, and so yeah, I'd say that's probably one thing. I'm looking around at other things that I now own that I couldn't afford to own before. Yeah, that's the one that probably really comes to mind.

I'm trying to think of what would be the next one. I think Bentley is still — I'm still definitely in Bentley's future demand set — and maybe one day I'll be able to afford the Continental GT Cabriolet, but we'll see. It's also, it's like, really kind of subconscious.

A lot of marketing works on our subconscious, right? We've got a bunch of stuff stored away in our biases that we're not actually really aware of, because they don't work in a conscious way. They're not in our conscious brains, right? And so much of marketing is about speaking to that subconscious and forming those biases that tend to control our behavior a lot more than advertising controls our behavior, or conversion advertising controls our behavior.

So sometimes it's kind of hard to tap into exactly what my biases are that have been built up over time, that might inform or affect my future behavior. But it certainly works that way. You know, we've got so much great cognitive science, behavioral science now that really informs the way that we make decisions.

You know, it's worth reading up on that. It's worth reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and digging into behavioral economics and understanding all of that stuff. It's super interesting, and it's really useful to know as a marketer trying to change behavior.

Elena: We covered a study on the podcast the other day where they were asking consumers if they'd heard of a brand or not, and they had been exposed to it through TV, and a lot of people couldn't remember it — but they actually had, like, body changes. They had, like, skin temperature changes and things like that, so that was cool.

Angela: I was wondering if maybe Rob and I had the same one, when I was thinking about what brand was working in my brain long before I visited. I don't know if this actually works, 'cause I visited as a child, so maybe it's a loyalty play, but mine's Disney. Lots of places to take kids on vacation, and particularly not a super cheap experience either, but whether it was the cruise line or the parks, that's what came to mind for me.

Rob: I think for me, I've been a diehard since the '90s. I've been diehard Apple, so of course I was always an Apple Watch guy — for sure, for sure. Just in on the ecosystem, and anywhere. And I've always been a nerd. I've never been an athlete, but I decided to try running, and I run like a turtle.

I'm very slow. But I always admired the Garmin watch wearers, because I'm like, "That's kinda badass. You're kinda off…" It's like a focused tool for whatever. So I'm now a Garmin watch owner, and it tracks just how slow I am, which is great. But they got me — you know, it's kind of…that was a long-term one. I always saw them in the distance. I always admired it, and now I'm in.

James: That's another great way to look at it, actually. If you wear something — like, I remember cycling: I'm not a cyclist. I'm a bit like you, Rob. My joke is that when I run, I look like a normal person runs while piggybacking someone else. That's me. And it's — I find it very hard. I'm also not a cyclist at all, but there was some super cool cycle brands that started up, like Rapha.

You know that brand Rapha? I was like, "Man, that looks so cool. If I was to ever ride a bicycle, I would get some of that gear, 'cause that looks great." So yeah, that's another really interesting way of thinking about it. And Ange, I just think Disney are amazing. I took my kids to Disneyland a couple of years back — the original one in Anaheim — and I was so impressed. That commitment to absolute excellence in customer experience is unbelievable. They are executional geniuses. That was a very impressive experience.

Elena: Amazing brand.

Angela: What's yours?

Elena: Yeah, mine — I was thinking, is Ironman the brand? Because I've been aware of Ironman forever. Like, you see people with the tattoos and… no.

Angela: Rob?

Elena: And then I even became a triathlete, but it took a few years before I actually purchased anything, like did an event through Ironman. So I think there's probably a lot of future customers too that maybe have families or aren't ready, but they're aware of the brand, and they've created such a good brand awareness around what they do.

So that was mine. But yeah, lots I could probably think of. So, well, James, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for joining us. We love what you do, what you stand for, what you talk about. Is there anything you'd like to plug right now, or anywhere you'd like people to go to follow you?

James: Look, just the "Future Demand" book and the world we're creating around it. So there's the book, and there's an app where you can ask the book anything. So once you've read the book, rather than carrying it around with your Post-it notes and pencil notes inside it, there's just an app where you can ask the book anything.

It'll give you great answers with charts and data in them. You can turn that into a PDF that you can then send to a colleague if you need to convince them of something. You can turn it into PowerPoint presentations you can download and edit and all that kind of stuff. And there's also a Future Demand community where you can come and join in conversations with all of us nerds that are interested in this kind of stuff, get updated on all the newest research, and ask me questions if you like — all that kind of jazz.

And so just get involved with the world. It's all at futuredemand.com. The URL was still available, which does not happen much these days, but hey, here we are. So yeah. Yeah, futuredemand.com — that's where you can find me and all that I do, and I hope to see you there.

Elena: Yeah, we're excited. When you released some early copies — you posted about it on LinkedIn — I had two different coworkers Zoom me like, "You're never gonna believe what I've got." And I was like, "I already have it, okay?" But they were very excited to get the sneak peek.

So we're excited for the physical copy too. We'll definitely be purchasing. So thanks so much for joining us.

James: You're so welcome. Thanks for having me, gang. It's been really fun.

Angela: James!

Rob: Thanks, James!