B2B Inspired

Turning Emotion Into Outsized Results

• BlueOcean | The B2B Agency • Season 2 • Episode 3

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In this episode of We Do B2B, we dive deep into the ever-evolving world of B2B marketing with none other than James Hurman — an innovation leader, best-selling author, and the co-founder of Tracksuit, which is rapidly changing the way the brand tracking is managed and monitored. For B2B marketing professionals in New Zealand and beyond, this conversation is packed with insights that can transform the way you think about creativity and effectiveness in your own strategies.

James discusses the intersection of creativity and commercial success in B2B, challenging the conventional belief that B2B marketing must be "sensible" or "serious." Through his journey, you’ll learn how smart, engaging campaigns can drive real results, how B2B marketers can build brand value over time, and why fostering creativity is key to breaking through in crowded markets.

Whether you're trying to prove the ROI of brand-building or just looking for fresh ideas to inspire your next campaign, this episode is filled with actionable insights. Listen in as James shares his expert knowledge on standing out in the B2B space and balancing short-term gains with long-term brand growth.

Connect with James on Linkedin: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshurman/

Connect with BlueOcean on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/blueocean-agency/

For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz

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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.

Dale Koerner:

Kia Ora and welcome back to We Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, new Zealand.

Dale Koerner:

I'm your host, Dale Koerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you. From emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand, we are here to help New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're B2B marketer marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Kia Ora, and welcome back to we do B2B.

Dale Koerner:

Now I'm going to be totally frank and say that I'm a little bit intimidated by the person sitting across from the table from me. I'm going to say we have as close to New Zealand marketing and advertising royalty as is possible on the show today. So joining us today is James Herman who, if you haven't come across him already, open your eyes and your ears. He is a founding partner of innovation studio, Previously Unavailable where we're shooting today. A best-selling author, three times over, let's say, co-founder of tracksuit, which is rapidly changing the way the brand tracking is managed and monitored, and on top of that, in case that wasn't enough, program director of the master of advertising effectiveness. So that's a hell of a CV yeah, it's um it's.

Dale Koerner:

It's all a lot of fun, though, so yeah, so take us through a little bit of your journey. First and foremost, how did, how did you end up where you are and doing what you're doing?

James Hurman:

okay, yeah, long, probably long story. So dropped out of high school, didn't go to university, um, ended up working as like a office admin person, you know and uh, and, and the it manager needed someone to help him fix computers. So I did. Actually did seven years in it before I moved into advertising, which, um, amuses most people and uh. So I ended up fixing computers in an advertising agency and figured out what they were doing was a lot more interesting than what I was doing and so managed to kind of con my way into the planning discipline in advertising and kind of just loved that and so sort of worked my way up through the ranks and ended up running planning departments and eventually leading an agency here in New Zealand.

James Hurman:

And then got out of that because I wanted to use like I love the strategy and creativity of the sort of process at agencies, but I wanted to sort of apply that more centrally to companies, and so I've done a bit of that with Stolen Rum, which was the first startup that I was involved with and that was kind of just really gratifying to be able to apply what you know to be right on your own. You know your own brand or your own company and so so I wanted to do more of that. So I started, Previously Unavailable to really be a kind of company that works with innovative people and and and really helps them with their product, with their experience, with their brand, you know all all that sort of stuff and and and. Then Previously's grown. Now we're 10 years old now old now, and really we're kind of a venturing business. So we have a venture capital fund, we invest in startups, we work with a ton of them, we create them from time to time and we write about them.

James Hurman:

So Caffeine, which is the kind of daily news media for the startup ecosystem here in New Zealand, we started last year. So really I think that we're, as an organisation, really passionate about New Zealand becoming, you know, the best in the world at creating innovative young companies that grow into, you know, very large global ones. And then, alongside that, when I was in advertising, I became really interested in advertising. I became really interested in advertising and marketing effectiveness, particularly creativity and how it it drives effectiveness in advertising and marketing. So I wrote a couple of books on that subject and have done a ton of research over the years and um, and really benefited from a kind of renaissance that we've been through in terms of understanding how marketing really works, and so that's what I teach on the Master of Advertising Effectiveness program. It's all of those evidence-based principles that have been discovered over the last 15 or so years that really help us understand how marketing works and how to make it work better.

Dale Koerner:

What a journey. I love the piece about being a venturing business and just the number of different threads that are on the go. You must struggle to switch off at night, or maybe you don't, and maybe that's why it's also possible.

James Hurman:

Yeah, no, I sleep pretty well, wear myself out every day.

Dale Koerner:

So what I wanted to dig into in this conversation is, if we look at some of the titles of your books, the Case for Creativity, future Demand I'd like to understand from your perspective how the relationship between creativity and effectiveness come to life in the B2B context. Because we know from you know the likes of the John Lombardo's and the Peter Weinberg's of the world, all the work that they've done with Ehrenberg Bass Institute. We know that there's an appetite to make B2B less bland. But making the commercial case for that is not always an easy hurdle to overcome, particularly in some of your more established traditional industries. So I'm going to start with a question, first and foremost, which is when you talk about creativity, what do you mean by creativity?

James Hurman:

Sure, yeah, it's like in marketing we're really good at coming up with these terms like creativity, that we bandy around a lot and we consider to be really important kind of ideas in the industry, but we consider to be really important kind of ideas in the industry, but we struggle to define them. You know, brand is one of those, insight is one of those. Yeah, creativity is one of those strategy, let's not even strategy.

James Hurman:

Yeah, yeah, there's lots of these sort of nebulous concepts, um. But the way that I define creativity in in its sort of marketing and advertising context is in sort of three ways. Firstly, doing something original, something fresh, something that hasn't been done before. It's not just sort of a repeat of best practice, but it's something really fresh and really new. Secondly, it's something that's really engaging, so ideas that pull people toward them as opposed to communicate at them.

James Hurman:

And thirdly, a high degree of executional craft quality. So you know, as those executional components, such as the writing and the photography and the direction and you know, all of that kind of stuff, is that being done in a way that really serves the idea and really kind of makes the campaign as engaging and memorable as it possibly can be. So those are three what I call creative award-winning qualities, because it's what award judges look for, and we can be skeptical about the value of awards and award judges and stuff like that, but they're the people really that kind of decide what's really creative and what's not so creative. And I think their definition is is, um is a pretty good one, you know? Has it been done before? Is it original? Is it really engaging? Has it been produced really well?

Dale Koerner:

so if we flip that around and say, well, if the award judges are, you know, setting the criteria for what is viewed as creative, that doesn't necessarily correlate with them being effective.

James Hurman:

So what's effectiveness from your perspective? Yeah, effectiveness is at its simplest, it's commercial outcomes. Right, so it's. Have we driven an increase in sales? Have we driven an increase in market share? Have we driven an increase in profitability? Those are the three sort of most important commercial metrics.

James Hurman:

But there's kind of a path that advertising takes to get to that outcome, and it happens sort of in three stages.

James Hurman:

So the first stage is, you know, does does the work stand out, is it engaged with, is it noticed, is it remembered?

James Hurman:

Um, and cutting through the enormous clutter is kind of your first, you know the first thing that you've got to do, right, and so so we look at metrics, like you know digital metrics, like likes and clicks and shares, and you know earned impressions, pr impressions, um, if you're doing campaign tracking, like how many people have seen the campaign, noticed it, remember it, those sorts of things, um, and those metrics don't tell us really whether the campaign has done anything, but they do tell us that it's taking that first step of standing out and being noticed and remembered.

James Hurman:

And then the next thing a campaign needs to do is is drive some kind of change in behavior or some kind of change in the way that people think about or feel about the brand and those kind of behavioral metrics like you know loyalty kind of stuff, you know rate of purchase, those sorts of things, brand metrics, health, brand awareness and consideration and preference and those sorts of things. And the commercial outcomes happen because we've identified the right change in behavior or change in the way that people feel about a brand. That's what sort of ladders up to those commercial results. So that's how I think about effectiveness. Does it sort of stand out, does it change behavior or feelings toward a brand in some way and does that ladder up to a commercial outcome?

Dale Koerner:

It's really interesting. I was talking to the team from Fisher Paykel Healthcare we're prepping for an event with them next week and a podcast as well and one of the things that they've really really lent into is actually this concept that comes out of, I suppose, the sales rhetoric, which is one of the most valuable things that you can hear is the word no, because when you've got barriers, when you've got resistance, when you've got something to work with, you can actually you can change things. Sure, yeah, um, so I think it really it's really interesting to hear your take on um on that piece and the. The comment around work that pulls people towards rather than pushes out is so true because you see so much which is just like you said it's, it's noise and it's there for the sake of it. Um, I'd be interested to know if there are any cases or any work in the btb realm that you actually see and know and recognize and think shit. That's a really good piece of work for creativity and effectiveness, no pressure yeah, totally.

James Hurman:

I mean a few examples that come to mind. So one would be back in 2014,. I think it was. Volvo did a piece of work selling commercial trucks which you might remember. It was Jean-Claude Van Damme's Epic Split. So essentially a B2B campaign because normal consumers don't tend to buy commercial trucks and massively effective campaign. It won the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix in Cannes in 2015.

James Hurman:

It drove the next year's sales up about 24%, which is a pretty big increase for a slow-moving like a truck, and, and and then it continued to work. So if you look at that, businesses increases in market share over the past eight or nine years you know, they continued to sort of grow, and that was a very creative piece of work.

James Hurman:

So that's one I think is great. It's now that this is work that amex did with small businesses in america. It's called the campaign's called small business saturday, so they created a special shopping day for everyone to go out and support small businesses, um, which was, um, again, just a, you know, wildly effective in terms of driving amex's brand and its sort of connection with that segment of the business market. Um, and also just brought to life and in a really creative way and you know, and so that's another one that I think is is really great. And then what ibm have done. I mean they've they've been great marketers for decades and decades but, um, you know, the, the, the work that they've done over the past sort of 15 or 20 years years has been really excellent and all off that platform of Smarter Planet, and they've done lots of really creative stuff with that and lots of pretty kind of you know dry business stuff off it as well, but it's a really strong platform that's lasted them a really really long time.

Dale Koerner:

So, yeah, those would be my three, yeah, you know, picks I find it really interesting because I've asked a number of people that same question and and jean-claude van damme and the volvo examples come up a number of times um, and definitely it resonates with me and I it feels more current than perhaps it is and maybe there's an insight in that. But I also find it eye-opening that the reference point for what effective and creative B2B work looks like is 10 years ago. If I asked you that question in a B2C context, you'd probably have worked from last year, the year before. So why do you think we don't see more of it?

James Hurman:

I think, a couple of reasons. I think there is a really strong in B2B gravitational pull towards stuff that feels sensible and grown up, because we tend to think of business customers, as you know, yeah, rational and serious. I mean I remember when, um, I was the planner on the vodafone business for many years here in new zealand and and uh, and I can remember really struggling with that business because they felt that if they did something that was really fun in the consumer space it would turn the business customers off. They would sort of see some like fun, you know, seemingly frivolous, you know consumer piece of advertising and they'd think, well, that's not a serious enough company for me.

James Hurman:

And that was a really pervasive belief at Vodafone. You know they always had to watch sort of how fun they got on the consumer side because they they might turn off the business customers and um, and all of the sort of you know the, the enterprise sales guys and all that you know we're all very nervous about, you know, yes, um, and so anyway I went and looked at their sort of numbers. They beat it because they tracked b2C and B2B brand health and they tracked their market share in those areas and all that sort of stuff. And even when we did the most creative consumer stuff, the business brand improved.

Dale Koerner:

So there was this halo effect, this kind of gravitational pull from one to the other.

James Hurman:

It was just this belief that if they did something fun, business people would not think this. It's completely. It's not based in any data or any kind of, it wasn't based in any empirical kind of analysis or observation. It was just this kind of feeling that people had that we need to be grown up and serious, um, and and it's just not true. We don't. You know, business people are people and of course, in our dealings with them we need to be professional. But the brand can be great fun, and I think you know what we do with our own B2B brands like Tracksuit. I mean, tracksuit's a ball, you know, it's loads of fun and where before market research was very dry and very serious, right, um, and so I think that's one big reason in b2b. I think the second thing is like b2b um, probably doesn't have quite as much um money, um money in the system.

Dale Koerner:

Bad spend is not.

James Hurman:

Yeah, there's not as many chances for shots on goal. So I think that's probably one reason and I think you know marketing and B2B is seen, you know, often more as a sales enablement function than it is seen as a brand building function. And if you're there just to focus on the sales end of things, you know you're not going to end up doing the sorts of work that really kind of builds the brand and really engages people. And so, yeah, I think those are probably the main reasons. But I think it's also changing.

James Hurman:

I mean, you mentioned John and Pete and they've done a great job of kind of really advocating for b2b marketing, um, thinking in the same way as as consumer marketing and in fact, you know all of us kind of effectiveness experts from around the world have worked with the B2B Institute back when John and Pete were there, um, uh, to replicate the analysis we've done in B2B uh, sorry, b2c um, with B2B data, uh, and we've proven, like all of the principles from the IPA, from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, the work that I've done. Um, they all play out just the same in B2B, like isn't? There is no difference, right? Um, the way that brands are built is exactly the same in b2b as it is in b2c, um, and so I think people are beginning to come around to that idea and hopefully that'll just. You know, the snowball will keep building yeah, I think there's definitely.

Dale Koerner:

Uh, on the, let's say, on the marketer side of that equation, there is definitely appetite there. Um, you on the marketer side of that equation, there is definitely appetite there. You know, we have a lot of conversations with marketers across the country who they're almost stymied by this business culture, like you said, a Vodafone of oh, we can't be too, you can't take too many risks.

Dale Koerner:

Oh you know, let's not say that piss off that key account. So there's appetite there, I suppose, on the marketer side. So there's appetite there, I suppose, on the marketer side, but on the business side of the equation there's still that resistance, there's still that reluctance. I mean, from an effectiveness perspective, you're able to basically make a financial argument for doing it right, for taking that creative path, for building future demand, for focusing on that side of the coin. Um, what would your advice be to a, to a b2b marketer here in new zealand who knows that they need to stop focusing just on that google ads, bottom of funnel, cpc, ctr space and actually grow the the bigger slice of the pie and grow the whole pie?

James Hurman:

yeah, yeah, totally, um, it's um. I mean, the reason that I wrote future demand um was very much for, uh, startup founders and venture capital. People and startups aren't all b2b, but lots of them are right, yeah, um, and venture capitalists as a, that's a b2b business and and so they had these sort of ideas about marketing and brand building being sort of you know, brand building being something that big stupid companies use to sort of you know con people into buying their crap products. Right, and certainly this sort of you know this tech startup world had really grown up believing if you build a great product, you know people will come and we don't need to make up for it with brand um.

James Hurman:

The tax that we have to pay yeah, exactly, and um, and again, that's not true. You know, we've sort of proven that out like, uh, you know it's um, uh, b2b brands, if they want to, you know, really get to scale they. They do need to build their brands. And anyway, the idea in future demand is really. I mean, what I tried to do is provide an explanation of why brand building is important that people could share with others. That made sense as a mental model, in the way that this very fluffy idea of brand, you know, doesn't make great sense. And the idea in the book is a really, really basic, simple one, which is that in any market, there are two types of demand. There's what I call existing demand, which are people that are in the market right now and ready to buy, and then there's a much larger group of people who are not in the market yet but will come into it in future. And so often when I talk at conferences, I say put up your hand if you're right now in the process of buying a new smartphone. You know, one or two hands go up uh, put up your hand if you think you'll buy a new smartphone in the next two years. Everyone's hand does it. Yeah, um, and that's just a sort of that's to illustrate that. You know, in any market there are the small group who are in the market and wanting to buy right now and a much larger group who will come into the market later, and marketing has a really different job to do with those two groups of people, right? So for those that are in the market and ready to buy, they actually do want information, like rational information. They want features and benefits and price and where can I get it? And calls to action. All that kind of stuff is absolutely relevant to those people, um, and it's absolutely, absolutely irrelevant to that much larger group of people. Yeah, because when you're not in the market for something, you're not going to take the time out of your day to learn about the features and benefits of products that you're not intending to buy until later, right, um? And this is the same in b2b as it is in b2c. So the erin big bass institute did a piece of work where they uh, the outcome was that in b2b categories, about five percent of customers buyers are in the category at any kind of given quarter and um, and 95 of them aren't right, so how we market to those, those two groups is really different.

James Hurman:

If we need to, if we're talking to those people who are going to come into the category later, um, we need to do something interesting enough to earn their attention, right? So all of us that will never buy a commercial truck but watch the jean-claude van damme spot, right, why did we do that? That doesn't make any sense. We're not, we don't, we'll never buy a truck. Why would we watch an ad for a truck? But we watched it because it was this really engaging idea.

James Hurman:

Yeah, um, that, uh, that meant that we, uh it sort of earned its way into our attention.

James Hurman:

And that's what we need to do as marketers in both b2B and B2C.

James Hurman:

We need to talk to that much larger group of people who will come into the market later, and we need to do the sort of work that earns their attention because it's creative and it's emotional.

James Hurman:

It's not seeking to drive like a sale, it's seeking to leave a positive memory. So when those people come into the category later on, they gravitate towards us and they respond better to our sales activity or our performance, marketing activity or what have you. And that's a real kind of thing about human nature when we come into a category, we gravitate towards what we're familiar with or what we feel good about, because we have an inbuilt familiarity bias all of us. That sits in our reptilian brain, and it drags us subconsciously towards things that we are familiar with. Yeah, um, and so the more familiar we make our brand among those people who come into the category next year, the more familiar we did, the more we do that job now, the more likely they are to say yes to the sale in a year's time, and so that's basically the principle, and it works exactly the same in b2b as it does in B2C.

Dale Koerner:

I really like that concept, the way that you frame that piece there about you're not even going to buy a Volvo truck, I mean, unless you've got cash to burn and you want to go and have some fun on a road trip. But the fact that the work was enough to engage you, to engage me, to engage producer Louis, it sets a really interesting yardstick for the level of work that you produce and the creativity behind it. But if we dial back to that startup space and like you said, in the B2B startup space, well, let's face it, everyone's watching the bank account Like the dollars really really matter in launch mode, that there's wastage in doing that, that you're gonna spend a bunch of money creating something that's so whiz-bang that a bunch of non-customers are paying attention to it.

James Hurman:

Yeah, I mean, wastage is a really interesting concept, so let's think about it. If we're reaching, if we're paying money to reach lots of people who are never going to buy from our category, then that, of course, is wasteful there's a german word for that right, and it literally means like paid overspill right, yeah, interesting, all right, good, um, well, if we do that, um, that's obviously quite wasteful.

James Hurman:

Um, if we're talking to a bunch of people who aren't in the category but will come in later, that's not at all wasteful.

James Hurman:

If we do a campaign and I think this is something that people kind of obsess unnecessarily about if we do a campaign that reaches lots of our in-market customers, lots of our out-of-market customers and also a bunch of others who'll never buy from the category, that doesn't matter. It's just the cost of doing business. So it doesn't. You know, we should be more focused on are we reaching the people that are in our category, and it sort of doesn't matter if we happen to also reach a bunch of other people. You know there's no way of reducing that or making that more efficient, and so I think, yeah, we should. We shouldn't obsess kind of, you know, know, worry too much about that. I think in the early days I mean, if you're in sort of year one of a new business, what the data says is it actually is better to sort of, you know, wait towards the short term, wait towards doing performance, marketing and sales stuff and all of that marketing and sales stuff and all of that.

James Hurman:

But as we go past that sort of first year, it becomes increasingly important to to talk, to build our brand among those people that have come into the category later so we can continue to sort of grow. What we've seen in the data is this very common pattern of businesses starting up going really, really well thanks to a great sales process, great performance marketing, great sales enablement, all of that kind of stuff, but then plateauing out. It's very, very common In the BC world, they say all the time they're really confused about why it happens. The reality is, for a business to continue making sales as efficiently as it did in the early years, it needs to scale its brand awareness at the same time as it scales its you know, its its spend on sales, people and performance marketing and those sorts of more short-term things. The two things. They are equally important and they need to be done together in order to drive a sort of sustainable long term.

James Hurman:

And the argument I'd say about it being sort of wasteful in year one, I mean I think if you don't intend to be in business after you know, after year three, it's fine, you know, then don't waste money on it. Yeah, if you hope to still be in business, like later on, like in year five or year 10, which is usually where you know you're starting to create proper value you need to be investing in that stuff in year one and year two and year three, you know. So it's an investment. It's not a wasteful cost. It's an investment in making sure that the business grows into the future in a way that generates lots of value.

Dale Koerner:

It's so interesting. We had very, very early on in our podcast journey brandon from henry um down in wellington on the show and brandon is a personal friend of mine, but he came from very much from a performance background. You know he was a seo expert, all of that stuff and that got them to a point and then all of a sudden he had to. They realized that they they couldn't acquire more customers within their efficient range and they're like, oh shit, we need to actually create more demand. We're just capturing what's there. Um, and that for him was this really uncomfortable journey of doing stuff that's like not generating a return today, which is an uncomfortable space for a lot of people who've come up through that pure digital space, right, yeah, absolutely.

James Hurman:

But it's a lot like investing money, right, um? You know why would I put all of that money into an investment when I could just spend it on myself now? You know well, you know why? Because the value of that's going to compound over time and you're going to end up with lots more money, right, um? And it's just the same with with marketing, your brand building. Is is just the same as investment. Yeah, you know, you, you you invest and you and you and you see those compounding effects come in over time and it's kind of, you know, I know it's boring not to see them all come in in the first three months, but, just like investing, we don't see all of the returns come in tomorrow. Right, we know that it takes a touch some time for that, um.

James Hurman:

So we really have to have that mindset and I think I mean the smart ones do right and this is I mean, maybe it's just darwinian right, the the smart businesses do understand this, um, and so if you want to be a smart business that is competitive in 10 years time, you know this is one of the things that, um, that you want to be a smart business that is competitive in 10 years' time this is one of the things that you need to be thinking about.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah, I really like that analogy of the compound interest. It was one of the headlines that came out of that recent podcast from the Uncensored CMO with Prof Scott Galloway, and the whole thing was talking about the compound interest of the decisions that you make along the way, and whether that's on a personal level or whether it's from a marketing perspective. What I like about that as well is that it's also a language. It's a financial language, and that's one of the things that marketers can sometimes struggle with is making that CFO friendly argument for what they're doing and why yeah, I mean the other one.

James Hurman:

The other one I use is is that let's say you have a plot of land and you want to generate income off that land. What you could do if you wanted to generate income really fast is you could quickly knock up kind of a small building and you could start charging rent for it and you would make income very quickly but at a very small amount. Or you could spend 18 months building a high rise and you wouldn't get any money for the first 18 months but then you'd get tons after that. So that's the trade-off Do we want a small amount of money in now or do we want lots of money in later? And of course we kind of need both in business, right? So there's always these two things are both important.

James Hurman:

The short term kind of sales activation, performance, marketing stuff is really important, but it's only half of it. And the long term is really important too. So you know, build a little shack, but make sure you're building the sky right at the back. You know yeah At the same time because sure you're building the sky right. You know yeah at the same time because otherwise you're just always going to be in a shack and that's going to be shit, isn't it?

Dale Koerner:

step out of the shack. Yeah, I love that. Um, now look, we're we're believe it or not somehow 35 minutes into this conversation. I'm conscious of your time, but I do want to ask um one sort of I suppose, closing, closing thought here is what are the things that marketers should go out and consume and learn other than your books and the? You know the master of advertising effectiveness absolutely do that. Um good plug. Um what else? What should we be consuming?

James Hurman:

well, I think there's probably a couple of answers to that. One is sort of in terms of consuming like best practice stuff, right, the work of the IPA in the UK, the work of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, the work of the LinkedIn B2B Institute these are all good sources of reliable, robust information on how marketing kind of really works, so, um. So I think really digging into all of that um and and remembering that most of what gets taught um at marketing school and I was talking to someone in the US who had recently been in a you know pretty good college MBA, you know marketing program, and he described what he'd been taught and it's amazing because most of what they talk has been debunked, like completely debunked, okay. And so you know, they talk a lot in marketing school and in mbas about, uh, about loyalty marketing and how important it is to drive loyalty. Yeah, um, it's been proven six ways to sunday that loyalty is just a factor of the category you can't like. Marketing can't meaningfully change loyalty rates and even if you do, it doesn't produce that much of a return, yeah, whereas marketing can very much increase penetration rates and that's a far faster way and it's safer and better way to grow.

James Hurman:

So I think, like being cautious of the kind of the, the old wisdom of marketing or what, what's being taught in schools, because it's only been the last 15 years that we've really had access to all of the stages to figure out how it really works, and it works really differently to how it's taught in schools.

James Hurman:

Um, then I think the other side of it is, you know, it's sort of knowing your knowing your stuff is one bit, but then sort of being inspired is the other bit. As a marketer, I think, um, understanding kind of human nature and culture and how people work. And you know, behavioral science is a really kind of cool field where you get to understand how people make decisions and why they make decisions and use a lot of that. And again, you know, even in B2B we primarily make decisions based on how we feel, based on our emotions, which are then post-rationalized by our kind of rational brain. And that's just as true in B2B as in B2C, even though we are sure that it's not true in B2B, because we're all making very rational decisions in B2B and it's not true to be um and uh and and it's not true um and uh and so so I think, kind of understanding how decision making happens is a really useful thing for marketers to understand culture.

James Hurman:

Um, I just read a great book by a new friend of mine, um, dr marcus collins, who wrote a book called for the culture, and it talks about sort of just how important, um and how predictive the cultures we subscribe to are of our behavior, as opposed to our demographics or our psychographics or those sorts of things. Um, so culture is a really interesting one, um and uh, beyond that I don't know, approach the world with open eyes and open ears and notice interesting things and, yeah, have fun with it.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah, I said that was going to be my last question, but I can't resist asking this one. Everything within marketing relies upon something being scarce or something being finite. There's only so much attention in the market, there's only so much ad spend. There's only so much reach that the market. There's only so much ad spend, there's only so much reach. That's, that's there and that's viable. What happens when everyone is following current best practice? In 15 years time, does the pendulum swing the opposite way?

James Hurman:

yeah, it's really interesting because that that is a really great point that um, marketing is um, marketing stops working when everyone starts doing the same thing. Yeah, right, so the principles that we're that we as an effectiveness community talk about is less about making the marketing content and ideas the same and more about, like, getting the budgeting right. We know how much we need to spend to grow. Now, we've done all that analysis and you, so you can, you know, you can set budgets in a way that underpin growth, um and uh, and, and they'll always be under spending competitors and in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, you know, and so so. So that's one that this um idea of sort of targeting and loyalty versus penetration, you know, do we tightly target the people that are in them, that are already our customers, or do we go and speak to the whole market? Um, that, that principle by the way, it's the latter that drives growth um and um, and, and that will always be kind of true, um, and then the sort of ideas around existing demand and future demand. That will always be true. Now, what we do with those principles when it comes to creating the actual marketing, so creating the strategy and creating the creative idea. If we end up all doing the same thing, we'll get worse and worse and worse. So we need to be constantly looking for the next thing. So still obeying those principles, um, but then using creativity and strategy to find new ways and new kind of yeah, new ways to engage and persuade people, as as as we go on and so um, so that will kind of never stop.

James Hurman:

I mean, mean, I think you know we're having all these conversations in the industry about AI. I think you know AI will replace almost all of what we know as performance marketing and almost none of what we know as brand building, because performance marketing you can absolutely I mean, it's the right thing to do is to be pretty rational, functional. You know, list out, give people information, the right people at the right time, and you can automate all of that. Future demand driving future demand requires surprising people, engaging people. You know doing things, that it's very, very difficult for AI to sort of come up with these sorts of ideas. Right, we're just much better at that. So as long as we keep doing, you know, as long as we keep using our human brains and our human creativity, then we can continue to excel. So, yeah, there are some principles which are more structural, and then there's creativity, which is more kind of. You know, we need to be thinking, doing it differently every time.

Dale Koerner:

And I kind of have to end that podcast on the phrase use your human creativity, because you'll always be better at that than AI. I think that's a perfect place to wrap up the conversation. Hey, James, honestly, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. I could have gone on, for I've got more and more and more questions that I want to ask you, but we don't have the time for it. But thank you so much, Really, really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. That's that. Thanks for listening to.

Dale Koerner:

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Dale Koerner

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