Adam Torres and James Hurman discuss James’ book.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews James Hurman, Founding Partner at Previously Unavailable, explore James course, The Master of Advertising Effectiveness and his book Future Demand: Why building your brand among tomorrow’s customers is the key to start-up success.
About James Hurman
James founded Previously Unavailable in 2014, chasing his passion for helping innovative companies use insightful strategic thinking to create products and brands that become sustainably successful. He chose the name ‘Previously Unavailable’ simply because he loves bringing new things into the world. James was formerly a strategic planner in the advertising industry, where he specialised in innovative marketing and the branding of innovative products and companies. In 2013 he was named the world’s #1 strategic planner. James is the author of The Case for Creativity, a book about how creativity creates business success that The Coca-Cola Company described as ‘beautiful words of wisdom’ and which has been reprinted several times in several languages. He’s also the author of two landmark marketing effectiveness studies, The Effectiveness Code (on behalf of Cannes Lions and WARC) and The B2B Effectiveness Code (on behalf of Linked In’s B2B Institute).
About Previously Unavailable
Previously Unavailable is a full-service innovation partner for ambitious businesses looking to invent or reinvent. The company collaborates with startups, scale-ups, and mature organizations to bring bold ideas to life—whether launching something entirely new or reimagining what already exists.
Through a combination of high-end strategy and world-class design, Previously Unavailable creates standout products and brands that break through market noise, captivate customers, and secure an unfair share of the future.
From concept to execution, Previously Unavailable helps businesses build what’s next.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, so today I have James Herman on the line and he is founding partner over at Previously Unavailable.
James, welcome to the show. Adam, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. And, let me add one other piece to this too, and also author of Future Demand. Why building your brand among Tomorrow’s customers is the key to startup success. And he’s also has a course called The Master of Advertising Effectiveness.
I tried to welcome you before going into the other accolades and the other things, James. ’cause it gets kind of long, man. How do you find the time? Yeah I get asked that a bit, but I just love what I do and can’t stop doing more of it. So, you know, maybe I’m my, my own worst enemy or maybe I’m my own best friend.
I’m not sure how’d you get into this, advertising game and then this business? Or like, or how did it suck you in? I don’t know. Like how’d you get started there? Oh yeah. I mean actually the, the funny story is I started in fixing computers in an advertising agency. So I was the guy, you know, running around plugging, plugging and unplugging ethernet cables and installing antivirus updates like way back when, you know, that was the world of IT support.
Yeah. And I pretty quickly figured out that what they were doing. And the agency was a lot more interesting than what I was doing, and so I kind of made a play to crossover into out of the IT department and into the strategy department as a strategy planner and and just kind of went from there.
Really. I love that job. I love that role. and really just, yeah, just got really interested in advertising strategy, but also really interested in advertising effectiveness and how we use data and marketing science to help us understand how advertising works, how we can make it work better. And so a lot of my life now is teaching those principles that have been discovered over the last 20 years or so.
That really help us kind of build brands and, advertise in a much more effective way. Hmm. so speaking of, I do wanna go a little and spend some time here on your book. So future demand. Why building your brand among tomorrow’s customers is the key to startup success? Like, what was the inspiration of this?
Yeah. This book was really, I mean, I, I was. Co concerned that startup companies that we were investing in down here were kind of resistant to brand marketing. You know, they, most of them lean very heavily on performance marketing and and performance marketing is great for sort of driving immediate sales, but if you wanna build.
A sustainable, profitable business that that grows into a very big kind of market leader. You also need to have a strong focus on, building your brand. And. I wanted to kind of explain that to startup founders and venture capital people in a way that they could understand and it didn’t feel like fluffy, you know, fluffy marketing stuff.
It felt like something that was actually critical to the commercial success of the business. I. And and it’s based on a really simple idea that in any market there are two types of demand, and there’s what I call current demand, which is people who are in the market and ready to buy right now. Mm-hmm.
And there’s what I call future demand, which is people who aren’t in the market and ready to buy at the moment, but will come into it in future. Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. Like, one thing that I do at when I speak at conferences is I often get the audience to put their hands up. I, I say. Put your hand up if you are in the process of buying a new mobile phone or you think you’re gonna do that over the next week or two.
Yeah. And and you know, say there’s a hundred people in the audience, you know, maybe two or three people put their hands up. And then I say, okay, now put your hand up if you think you’re gonna buy a new mobile phone. I. In the next two years, and almost everyone’s hands go up. Wow. And there’s a demonstration, right?
And, and this is how all markets work, right? There’s a small group of people who are in the market. There’s a large group of people who aren’t yet, but they’re gonna come into the market later. And as marketers, we’ve got two jobs. We’ve got the job to convert the people that are in the market today. Make sure they choose our brand instead of our competitors.
And we’ve got this other job to make our brand familiar to people that are gonna come into the market later, so that when they do, they gravitate towards us and they’re more likely to buy from us. So that’s what brand building is really all about. Just building up familiarity and kind of emotional.
Positivity towards our brand in the minds of people that are gonna come into the market in the next months and years. So that when they do, they, you know, we are much more likely to convert them. That’s how you drive sustainable compounding growth over time. You also have, and I don’t know if these are kind of like in a tandem, if they work like hand in hand or not.
So correct me if I’m off on this but the master of advertising effectiveness, I’m a big fan of books. Everybody that’s been watching or listening to this show for a long time no. I love supporting and promoting authors. I think it’s amazing and it’s. Difficult to write books. I’ve written a few and have been very fortunate and it’s really been a huge advocate of people writing books, hence, and we also publish books as well.
But so I might be a little biased there, but we’ve published over 400 authors, but I’m just a fan. I love it whether somebody’s using a pr, a publisher like us, or if they’re out there, self-publishing, whatever, I love people doing a book. But then the next step in, my opinion, and it’s ultimate is creating some type of course or.
Figuring out a way to add value by expanding on the content and letting people benefit in that way, I feel like is completely the next level. So do these work in, I guess, two part question for this, James. Does this course kind of work in, tandem with the book? Yes. No. And if not, either way, I want you to talk a little bit about the course for us too.
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I mean very, very much so. So a lot of the principles that I sort of touch on in the book are the same principles that I teach on the program, so, mm-hmm. To give you a bit of context about the program what’s happened over the last 20 years or so is there’s been a huge kind of growth in the area of effectiveness research and marketing science.
So this is people studying large sets of data pertaining to marketing. Spotting patterns in that data to understand how advertising and marketing really work. And we’ve discovered, you know, a number of, sort of principles, patterns in this data, which tell us that when a brand acts in this way, it tends to create these sorts of results.
And so we’ve learned a lot about how you budget correctly for success. How you target correctly, how you manage the, the short and the long term. So the mm-hmm. You know, manage that kind of converting current demand and build, building future demand. How you use distinctive assets in your branding, how you use creativity and, how creativity works and how it makes advertising more effective.
How you deploy emotion rather than just sort of sending rational messages at people. The kind of power of eliciting and emotional response from the audience. So all of these sorts of I guess effectiveness principles have, have really come about in the last 20 years. And so they’re what I teach on the course and, and so the.
people that I teach, and they tend to be marketers and advertising agency folks from all over the world. So we’ve taught, I don’t know, more than a thousand marketers and agency folks so far from about 40, 40 different countries around the world. and those marketers, you know, the course equips them with a, really evidence-based understanding of how advertising works, what they can do to make it work better so they can sort of better plan.
They’re advertising, for greater commercial success. Hmm. And I know there’s only so much being covered here, and I know there’s a lot of different a lot of different angles we can look at this from. But I do wanna provide let’s just pick one. So we’ll say brand building.
Why should you invest, or why should founders invest in advertising that builds brands? Not just for now, but even in the minds of future buyers. Like, why, why is that so important? Now, you mentioned, obviously your cell phone example, but I want you to take a step further. Yeah, totally. So what happens if, you we’ve grown up, or a lot of marketers have grown up in a very performance marketing driven era where there’s sort of mentor model of how advertising works is.
You, you send out sort of a, hopefully persuasive message about your product mm-hmm. To a certain target audience, and then you measure how many people buy the product from that communication that you’ve sent out. And, and so that supposes that the way that advertising works is that it persuades people to buy a product.
Mm-hmm. Advertising actually doesn’t work in that way, or at least that’s not the whole way that advertising works. The way that advertising works is. Partially to convert those people who are in the market, get them to choose us. But it actually, most of its value comes from building up the brand’s familiarity.
And it’s kind of the emotional positivity that people have towards it, how much they like that brand in the minds of these people that are gonna come into the market later. And there are a lot more of them. And so if we want to if we want to build, a, a brand that grows past its first segment of early adopters.
Mm-hmm. And we want our performance marketing to maintain its efficiency and effectiveness over time. Yeah. We also need to be doing that second job. What that second job does is it grows our brand among a much bigger audience, sort of crosses the chasm if you like. You know, talks to people who. Who aren’t gonna buy right now.
They’re not the early adopters, they’re not the people that need the product now, but they are gonna be your important and valuable customers and future. And that’s a really important job to do. So it’s about building you know, making sure that we are attracting those future customers. And it also has an effect on profitability.
So the more that people are. Emotionally positive towards a brand. The more they like a brand, the more they’re willing to pay for that brand. And so they’re willing to buy you, you know, when you’re not on sale or you’re not running a promotion, or you are a little bit more expensive than your competitors, or you put your price up a little bit, you know all of those.
When someone has. A sense of emotional connection to a brand. They’re much more likely to pay a little bit more for it. And what that means ultimately is profitability, right? If we can charge, if we can sell our product to 10% more people, some of that new revenue goes to the bottom line because we’ve gotta service those new customers.
If we can raise our price by 10%, all of that goes straight to the bottom line. And so, you know, one of the big games in marketing and business is. How do you grow the profits of an organization? How do you enable an organization to sell something for a little bit more money? Because what that translates to in terms of profit at the end of the year is it makes an enormous difference.
Hmm. It really does. And just a quick funny story about, well, not funny, I, guess in hindsight, ’cause I didn’t, I didn’t know we were actually doing this at the time, but when we initially launched our podcast agency, so this was during the pandemic, before that, we didn’t really do, we, obviously did a lot of production for our own shows.
And we do, you know, just quite a bit. And I know that when we first we brought on our first couple of early adopters and it was really people that just. Wanted help. And they saw what we did and they were like, oh, can you help us launch a show? And I was, we were like, at first I was like, no. Like we can’t.
But then, then I realized we weren’t doing less interviews ’cause I wasn’t traveling as much because all the conferences were shut down. So I’m like, well actually we have some, we do have some bench time. Yes, we can help you launch a show. And so in the beginning, the early days of kind of like marketing that there was you know, we had our early adopters, but the question always was, well what about all those people that wanna start a show that maybe pie aren’t?
Like podcasting just wasn’t quite as pop like as popular. There’s less shows. People don’t know exactly what it is. Like, would, those people ever come around like in the future that wanted to launch a show, but not right that moment? So if I was doing your cell phone example and I was like, all right, who wants to launch a podcast?
Some hands went, oh, who’s gonna do it in the future? Maybe a couple more go up and we’re benefiting based exactly on what you said right now. And the fact that we did cultivate that type of content. And we did create that type of content, I should say that was teaching people about podcasting and otherwise, so that we did end up being big benefactors of that wave.
And I, and we’ve launched now over 200 shows actually over, I think approaching over two 50 now shows. And so that all stemmed from what you, the, the concept you just described. When we initially started, we didn’t have like, oh. 200 hundreds of people coming to, oh, Adam, we’d love to launch podcasts.
No. People were still kind of saying, what’s a podcast? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that’s, and that’s only like what, five years ago-ish? Roughly? I’m thinking off the top of my head. Something like that. Four or five years ago. Yeah, totally. So I, I love that concept. I just didn’t know exactly. That’s what we are doing.
So. Yeah, I can see the benefit in taking your course just from even just that little nugget you just gave us. Yeah. Yeah. It’s really, I mean, that, that, that’s a really, you know, good example to use and a lot of the content that you were putting out in those early days, you know, if you judge that purely on how many people then responded and, and Yeah.
And decided to, yeah, like nobody wants to launch a podcast. It’s the dumbest business ever. That’s what Yeah. But but you would’ve, that’s what I would’ve said if I didn’t. Yeah. And, and you would’ve judged that marketing as a failure if you, all you’d done is kind of measured it against its ability to immediately convert a client or a customer.
But now in hindsight, you can see that that actually. Over the long term did a really great job for you in terms of attracting those customers over time. So that’s one of these misnomers in marketing, you know, we tend to judge all marketing on its ability to to drive immediate customer immediate sales, immediate customers.
Mm-hmm. And that’s wrong. We should be judging some of our marketing on its ability to convert customers. Absolutely. So we should be judging much more of it on its ability to build our awareness, our familiarity in the market. Yeah, so that later on we benefit from that. Love it. Well, James, man, this has been really insightful having you on the show today.
I appreciate you making some time out for us and really and for everybody listening, definitely the book, the book is going to be in the show notes, so you’re gonna be able to click on the link and. Excuse me, I pick up a copy. Future demand. Why building your brand among tomorrow’s customers is the key to startup success.
And then James, how can people connect? How can they work with you and your team? How can they follow your content? Yeah, I’d say a co, a couple of things, if you want to kind of follow me and what I’m up to, go to james herman.com. That’s James Herman, spelled H-U-R-M-A-N. And and if you’re interested in taking the program go to m AE Academy.
And that has all the information on the the Master of Advertising Effectiveness Program. Perfect. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put those links in the show notes, so you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet.
Make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And James, thanks again for coming on the show.
Thanks so much, Adam.