Brand Building is Not a Luxury—It’s a Growth Strategy

[00:00:00] Brand Building isn't a luxury. It is a necessity. If you want your business to grow, you can't just rely on performance, marketing, or ads. You need to create future demand by building brand awareness today. But how exactly do you do that? And why is creativity the key to making it work?

[00:00:18] In this episode, I sit down with James Herman, a leading expert in marketing effectiveness to break down the science behind advertising success. You'll learn why some brands thrive while others struggle and how you can use creativity today to start making sure your brand stands out. So stay tuned. We're going to cover all this and more in this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:00:48] TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing coach.

[00:01:18] Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. This is Neal Schaffer. Welcome to the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast, where every week we are offering actionable advice for small businesses, content creators, entrepreneurs, marketers, to help you improve your business with digital marketing one episode at a time.

[00:01:47] So branding, brand awareness. I will be very honest that as a small business, this is probably not the place where you're investing a lot of your money. You want to see immediate ROI from your marketing. And I get it. I'm very similar. But this episode, this interview really changed my mindset towards what many would call this fluff KPI of brand building and brand awareness.

[00:02:13] So what I've learned is that brand awareness isn't just for big companies with deep pockets. It is a critical part of growing any business, including startups and small businesses. Many companies focus only on short-term sales and performance marketing, missing out on the long-term benefits of building a strong and recognizable brand. So today I sit down with James Herman, the founder of Previously Unavailable. He's also an author and a great guy.

[00:02:43] And I think your mind is going to be blown like mine was because we're going to explore the science behind advertising effectiveness. James shares why businesses struggle to grow beyond their initial customer base and how creative evidence-based marketing strategies can help. We discussed the balance between performance marketing and brand building, the power of storytelling and advertising, and the critical role of creativity in making campaigns more effective.

[00:03:10] If you've ever wondered by some brands, maybe some of your competitors seem to attract loyal customers effortlessly while others fade away. This is the episode for you. Get ready to rethink your marketing strategy and unlock the true potential of your brand in this interview. With no further ado, here's my talk with James Herman. You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer. Hey, everybody.

[00:03:39] This is Neil Schaefer and welcome to another live stream edition of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today we're going to be talking about advertising effectiveness, marketing as a science with evidence-based strategies for success. And what's going to be really interesting about talking about the science of marketing effectiveness is that our guest today is actually the founder and CEO of a creative studio called Previously Unavailable.

[00:04:08] We're going to ask him about that name, James Herman. And if you go to his website, previously.co, you are going to see a extremely creative website, unlike anything you've ever seen before. So I'm really excited to get into this conversation. And as James describes his own creative studio, they work with a lot of VC-funded companies, as well as smaller businesses that want to grow based on their branding and growing their business through branding and creative strategies.

[00:04:37] So I'm really excited for this conversation. James, welcome to your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Hey, Neil. It's great to be here. Yeah, can't wait to dive in. So previously unavailable. I'm trying to think where I've seen that phrase before, and then I realize I've never seen it before. So maybe that's the great conversation starter that lures people like myself into wanting doing business with studios like yourself. But why don't we start with just introducing yourself and your company to our audience? Sure. Well, hi, everyone. My name's James.

[00:05:07] I'm coming to you from Auckland in New Zealand, where I'm based in the studio here at Previously Unavailable. So I spent my life before this company as an advertising strategist, working in big ad agencies on big brands, and then found myself wanting to get more involved with the startup community, more with kind of the creation of new brands and companies. And so I created this company called Previously Unavailable. It's called that because I just like things that didn't exist before.

[00:05:36] And so we work with companies that are inventing or reinventing, and we do all sorts of stuff with them from helping them with innovation strategy, new product development, creating their brand, setting the strategy, designing their brand. We also have a venture capital, actually two venture capital funds that we invest into companies through. And we also create companies.

[00:05:58] So over the last three and a half years, we've created two marketing technology companies, TrackSuit, which is a brand health tracking company, and ideally, which is a rapid research platform for testing new concepts. So it's a busy and quite diverse world. But, you know, we try and use the power of, you know, great brand thinking to really, you know, amplify, accelerate everything that we do. That sounds really fascinating. It sounds like you're working with a lot of amazing startups and doing very creative work.

[00:06:27] I think one of the things we wanted to talk about today was this concept that you work with a lot of startups. And for any company listening, even if you're not a startup, you only have a finite group of customers, really trying to get beyond those customers that you currently have to expand your business. So, you know, expanding for startups, it's expanding beyond your initial audience of early adopters. And for bigger businesses, it's getting beyond your own customer base.

[00:06:54] If you want to grow from 10 to 20 million, you can create a lot of new products and hope that your current customers buy them or expand that customer base. So what would be your, you know, your advice for the startups that you work with, for instance, that are in the space of how to go about doing that? Yeah, sure. I mean, startup is a long term game. So if you look at the average length of time between a startup taking its kind of first seed investment through to it exiting, if it makes it that far, it's about 10 years.

[00:07:22] So that's actually a kind of a, it's a long time period, right? So as a founder, it's not only your job to grow the business, you know, next month or next quarter or, you know, meet your sort of immediate targets. Your job ultimately is to make sure that the company makes it all the way through that 10 years and becomes very valuable in the process. That's what you're really trying to do. So having an eye on year three, four, five, you know, when you're in year one is really important.

[00:07:50] And as you were alluding to, you know, that the way that companies start, they tend to go out and try and find the low hanging fruit, the early adopters, the customers that are kind of ready to buy what they've got to sell. And so they're often very good at that. Companies are often pretty good at going out using performance marketing, using kind of good sales motion to identify and attract those early adopters.

[00:08:15] But what we see so much in the startup industry is companies that grow really fast in their first sort of one to three years. And then their results start to plateau out. They see decreasing ROI from their performance marketing activities. They find new customers harder to find. And so the sort of financial mechanics of the business get really disrupted, right? It's costing more and more to find new customers. So your margins coming down further and further and you sort of hit the skids.

[00:08:43] So the answer to that is making sure that your brand reaches people who are not in the market right now but will come into the market at some point in future. So this is kind of based on the reality that in any market there's two types of demand. There's what I call existing demand, which is people that are in the market right now and they're ready to buy from your category.

[00:09:07] And then there's what I call future demand, which is the much larger group who aren't in the category ready to buy just yet, but they will come into the category at some point in future. So to give you kind of a, to paint this picture a little bit more clearly, what I often do when I'm speaking to big audiences is I say, can you put your hand up if you're in the process of buying a new mobile phone, mobile phone, as you say, over in your parts, or you think you're going to do so in the next kind of month or so. And a few hands go up.

[00:09:36] And then I say, okay, can you put up your hand if you think you're going to buy a new mobile phone in the next two years? And everyone's hand goes up. And that's just a demonstration of this reality. And it's the same in any category. There's a very small group of people who are in the category and ready to buy right now. And there's a much larger group who aren't, but will come into the category later.

[00:09:54] And so if we only focus on that little small group of people that are in the market today, then what we don't do is sort of introduce ourselves and warm up that big group of people who are going to come into the market later so that they become familiar with us before they do so. We have a kind of familiarity bias as humans. We tend to gravitate towards things that we are familiar with just because we're familiar with them.

[00:10:18] And so it's really important as a brand, if you want to be successful next year, you want to have great performance metrics next year to do some of that brand building. Now, lay those foundations, go out and talk to people who, you know, reach people, communicate with people who are going to come into the market later. Not to get them to try and buy today, but just to make them familiar with the brand so that they do gravitate towards us when they come into the market.

[00:10:42] Early adopters have, you know, one thing that characterizes early adopters is they have a weaker familiarity bias. They're more likely to kind of ignore that familiarity bias and buy new things. But the vast majority of the market beyond those early adopters actually needs to feel familiar with us before they're comfortable buying from us. And so what gets us that first sort of, you know, one to three years growth is not the same thing that's going to get us to the next stage.

[00:11:11] So that initial performance marketing that every startup, every brand does, that's really only going to get you those early adopters that don't have that familiarity bias or as much of it that you talk about. I guess the challenge then is, so the brand building advertising then that you're doing now to get in the minds of consumers, clients in the future. You know, if I'm the CEO, how do I believe in that investment?

[00:11:37] Because you're basically asking the CEO to take a leap of faith that by investing now, it's going to achieve returns in the future. And I'm sure you have lots of these conversations with your clients. And so what does that, the brand building, you know, what do the creatives look like? What does the strategy look like? And then more importantly, what does that conversation look like about the ROI of doing that? Yeah. I mean, just to sort of go to the first part of that question, we do all sorts of things as humans, which are forms of delayed gratification.

[00:12:05] So, you know, when we go to the gym, we don't expect to have our summer body, you know, immediately come to us after the first workout. When we eat healthy, we don't expect to lose weight straight away, right? There's many things that we do, which we know do pay off in the long term and they take, you know, a little while for the results to come. So brand building is a lot like that. So it is, it's not really a leap of faith. It's just sort of intentionally doing things that will pay off in the longer term.

[00:12:35] And there's plenty of science and evidence around the fact that those investments that we make in brand building do pay off over the longer term. And just going back to what you said, the performance marketing is only going to get you so far. Performance marketing on its own is only going to get you so far. Performance marketing will continue to deliver results if you build your brand at the same time. So we've done a couple of big studies with Amazon and with TikTok where we've taken the brand health data out of one of our companies, Tracksuit,

[00:13:04] which tracks brands awareness and consideration and preference and those sorts of things. And combined it with really big data sets from Amazon's retail platform and TikTok's performance marketing platform. And what we can see in both of those cases is the brands that have higher awareness have better performance marketing metrics.

[00:13:24] So, for example, the conversion rate on TikTok performance advertising, if you've got 60% brand awareness, it's about three times higher than if you've only got 20%. Makes sense. And it's the same on Amazon. You know, if you want to continue growing on Amazon, putting more money in and seeing the same kind of sales efficiency come out of that,

[00:13:45] it's the bigger brands, the brands with the larger awareness that can maintain that without sort of plateauing out and the performance marketing becoming less efficient and less effective. So there's plenty of data. It really does work. It does pay off next year rather than this year. But again, I go back to, you know, you're playing a long game as a startup founder and you should be playing a long game as any business.

[00:14:09] You know, if you want to be a thriving business in five years, there are things you need to be doing this year to ensure that that happens. So let's talk a little bit about the creativity. What you say makes a lot of sense. I've seen that as a fractional CMO. I have definitely seen that with my clients that the more brand awareness they have across the board, Amazon ads, social media ads, Google ads, it's going to improve the cost per conversion, cost per click without a doubt. So then it comes down to, okay, this is what the data suggests.

[00:14:37] We get into this like evidence-based science that says you have your performance marketing. As you increase your brand awareness with these brand building creatives, it will help your performance marketing improve over time. And it's going to take time. So you also mentioned that these creatives, this power of creativity, right? How advertising with award-winning creative qualities leads to better results for brands than marketing without creativity.

[00:15:01] I'm curious, I'd like to, you know, spend a few minutes talking about this, but I'm curious if also you have data from working with, you know, TikTok or Amazon or Google that talks about this as well. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so about 13 years ago now, I wrote a book called The Case for Creativity, which was all about the link between creativity and effectiveness in advertising.

[00:15:24] And so just to break down those terms, what I mean by creativity is advertising that's really original and really engaging, engaging ideas rather than just spewing information at people. And really well-crafted, right? Really well-designed and art-directed and executed. And so those are the creative award-winning qualities that I talk about.

[00:15:47] And then when I say effectiveness, I mean commercial effectiveness like growth and sales, market share, profitability, those sorts of hard commercial metrics. And what we saw, so I did a massive meta-analysis of all of the work that had been done within research institutions, within universities, within industry bodies, looking at more and less creative work, creative campaigns, and comparing the effectiveness of those.

[00:16:13] And without exception, all of those studies show that more creative work is more effective. And there really wasn't a single study that showed that it was the other way around. You know, when we're more creative with our advertising, it does, you know, improves its effectiveness chances really, really significantly.

[00:16:31] What we've learned more recently, so going into my most recent book, Future Demand, which I sort of briefly talked about a moment ago, what we've learned is that it's quite nuanced. So when we're talking to customers that are in the market, that pool of existing demand in our market, those customers, they're shopping the category. They're interested in buying something. They're wanting to make a decision.

[00:16:55] So we can present them with pretty kind of functional, rational information about our products and, you know, just be really kind of crisp and clear about what we're selling, put a sales message in front of them. And that works pretty well in terms of converting people into a sale. But if we're talking to people who are not in the market, if we're talking to that pool of future demand, that much bigger group of people who will come into the market later, they're not shopping the category.

[00:17:20] And they've got way too much going on in their lives to bother watching your ad detailing your product credentials. They just don't care at that point. Right. What creativity does is it earns the attention of people who aren't in the market yet. So when you look at those two jobs, when we're converting existing demand, we actually want to make a sale.

[00:17:42] When we're creating future demand, we actually want to attract attention and leave an imprint in people's memories, leave them feeling something about us, not remembering facts because people don't remember facts very long, but they remember feelings for a really long time. And so it's more important to stop trying to make the sale and start trying to kind of engage people, entertain people. That's the sort of role of that much longer term advertising. And I'll give you an example that sort of wraps this up quite nicely.

[00:18:10] You'll probably remember the ad from a few years ago. It's an ad for Volvo Trucks where Jean-Claude Van Damme does the splits over two Volvos. Yeah. Okay. So, Neil, are you in the market for buying a commercial truck? No, it's funny enough. I actually drive a Volvo. So you're preaching to the choir here. But yeah, I'm not in the market to buy a truck. You're absolutely right. You're not in the market to buy a truck. So why did you watch that ad? There is no rational reason for you to consume that advertising.

[00:18:40] You're never going to buy a commercial truck, right? And that's the same probably for everyone listening to this show. You watch that ad because the creativity in that ad earned your attention, right? Even though it's of no functional use to you whatsoever, it earned your attention. It also earned the attention of all of the people that would come into the commercial truck market over the next few years. Sure.

[00:19:02] And so if you look at Volvo's sales and market share gains over sort of the last 10 or so years since that ad ran, they have made really, really consistent sales and market share gains, been a really, really high performer. And that's because that ad reached hundreds of millions of people because it was so creative. It left them with a feeling about Volvo, a really positive feeling. And that translated later into greater sales success for the business. So that's the kind of difference between the two styles of advertising.

[00:19:31] Future demand, Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits over to reversing Volvos. So existing demand, actually Volvo saying, here are the features and benefits of our truck and here's how much it costs and here's where you can buy it from and call to action. Makes a lot of sense. I think that, you know, for a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs that I help as a fractional CMO or listeners, they look at the brand awareness advertising as more of a luxury, right? Let me build my business bigger because I only have limited marketing budget. I want to focus on the immediate sale, right?

[00:20:01] But what you also say makes a lot of sense, but then it gets down to creativity, right? Do you think that Volvo got that ad on the first try or was it an A-B testing of 10 different concepts, test advertising? You know, there's a non-scientific side to creativity, but there's also the A-B testing scientific side. So I'm just curious for those that are listening that are not creative, right? Just plain and simple.

[00:20:28] How can they strive, other than obviously hiring you and your agency, James, but how can they strive to create, you know, is it possible for them to create that sort of creative advertising in-house? Or are you going to say work with creative people or hire a creative person is the only way to do it? What do you feel about that? So I'll just get back to what you first said and touch on that quickly. So seeing sort of, you know, brand advertising as a luxury. Companies don't do brand advertising because they're big.

[00:20:56] They're big because they did brand advertising. So it's not, I mean, to think of it as a luxury is nuts. Like it's just not a luxury. It's a must have if you want to grow a big, valuable, successful company. And then in terms of creativity, yeah, I mean, there's nothing better than working with great creative people to do great creative stuff. That's what they do for a living. They do that all their lives. They're way better at it than you will ever be.

[00:21:26] And so that is the, you know, the best thing to do. But short of that, you know, even if you are doing things in-house, it's just really kind of having that different mindset for the two different jobs you've got. If you're producing advertising to existing demand, you can be quite features and benefits led, quite rational in your information, you know, all the rest of it. But when you're creating something to build future demand, you want to, you know, target that a lot more broadly.

[00:21:52] And you want to do something that's going to leave people with a feeling, not a bunch of facts. And so, you know, you're probably never going to do anything as good as the agency that did the Volvo spot. But you'll definitely get a lot closer. In terms of testing, A-B testing, I mean, very, very difficult, to be honest, on the future demand side.

[00:22:13] So testing something and figuring out whether that has left a positive memory imprint and whether that's going to lead to a sale in a year's time is very, very difficult to prove with that sort of testing that we use in the performance world. So in many cases, you need to kind of understand that the science proves that this works, as opposed to trying to sort of analyze it right down to sort of every execution that you do. But, you know, stay inspired.

[00:22:42] Look at other companies that have done things that have, you know, spread virally or really captured the imagination of a big audience. Or just look at sort of the companies around your search around the Internet for the best types of advertising. Learn the craft and try to do similar things yourself. Meta does also offer like brand lift data. So there is a little bit of data you can put behind this? Yeah. I don't know. Just out of curiosity. Is it OK? It's a hack pretty much to sell more ads.

[00:23:12] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I probably wouldn't spend too much time listening to Meta about, you know, how brand building works because, yes, they are in the business of taking as much money off you as possible. But it's better to sort of look at the work of, you know, there's a number of institutions around the world. The Ehrenberg Bass Institute in Australia, which is a marketing science kind of department within the university in Adelaide.

[00:23:38] They have done tons and tons of, you know, academic research into marketing science, which is published in most famously in a book called How Brands Grow. And that's all very sort of, you know, data evidence. There's also the work of the IPA, the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising in the UK. They have done lots of work around creativity, around effectiveness, what, you know, how marketing really works.

[00:24:03] So I'd also suggest looking at them and reading some of the stuff that they put out. There is mountains of data that proves the value of what I'm saying, which we didn't have 20 years ago, by the way. We didn't really know for sure how marketing worked 20 years ago. Lots of people had lots of opinions on it, but we didn't have the data evidence that we now have. And so it's useful for people to know that there is actually, we do actually understand how marketing works now.

[00:24:31] There's a lot of data behind the sort of basic principles of how marketing works. And that data is all pretty accessible if you go and look for it. Gotcha. What you talk about there makes a lot of sense. And just like any art or any craft, and you've written books and I've written books, that's a craft as well, right? The written word. And so creativity, you just got to start doing it. And I guess if you're focused on the engagement and creating that emotional connection, you're just measuring with a different KPI.

[00:24:59] And it's hard to really apply science to it, as you allude to. But one sort of hint in preparing for this podcast, you talk about the importance of storytelling in brand building. And I'm wondering if that is for those that aren't as creative as they could be, does that storytelling, obviously it complements everything you do, can't replace anything. But tell me about the role of storytelling in this creativity and these brand building activities that brands do. Sure. Yeah.

[00:25:24] I mean, as humans, I think we've always found that the best way to transfer information is through storytelling, going back to, you know, the dawn of history. We tell stories because stories tend to stick in our minds more than facts. And so, you know, Aesop's fables, for example, you know, stories that you tell children, you tell children stories because they do not give a f*** about facts. And so we, you know, we tell kids stories so that they learn things, right?

[00:25:53] They learn basic principles. And our brains continue to work like that even as we move into, you know, our adult years. And storytelling is basically like really about kind of, you know, introducing people to your brand through not just facts and figures and messages, but through some kind of narrative arc. Right. And I talk a lot about the three-act linear structure story.

[00:26:21] So almost all of the greatest films and books and plays and all the rest of it from time follow this basic three-act linear structure. At the start, someone is going about their day perfectly, happily. They get, you know, something happens and they get forced into some sort of challenge and they have to go about solving that, you know, solving the mystery or capturing the heart of the love interest or whatever it might be. Yeah. Finding the bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. Catching the bad guy.

[00:26:50] Act two is kind of all the ways they go about sort of doing that. And act three is where they solve the mystery or they capture the heart of the love interest or they catch the bad guy and the problem solved and everyone lives happily ever after. Human beings love that story, right? We can't get enough of it. We just keep watching that same story over and over and over and over again. And so as a brand, like telling your story, you can use that same kind of three-act structure to tell your own story.

[00:27:19] So act one is, you know, why you started your business in the first place. You know, at some point you thought you saw a problem to be solved in the world or you thought something could be better and you felt passionately enough about that to dedicate your life to actually doing that, solving that problem. So that's your act one. Why did you choose that problem? Why is it an important one? Act two is the ways that you're addressing that problem. So that is your product or your service, you know, and the features and benefits and what's better and different about that.

[00:27:49] And act three is how that product is going to improve, you know, improve the life of your customers or improve the state of the world or, you know, what's the outcome of your products becoming a really big success, right? More people are going to find it easier to do X, Y, and Z or whatever it might be.

[00:28:07] So telling that story sort of why I chose this problem to focus on, how I'm focusing on fixing it with my product and what that's going to enable for, you know, our customers or the world around us, telling that whole story is really important. What we usually do is we usually only tell people act two. We just go out there and we say, oh, we've got this product and it does all these things. Now, if you only showed people act two of a movie, they would probably kind of vaguely understand what was going on, but they wouldn't care, right?

[00:28:36] Because they wouldn't have, they don't know the beginning of the movie and they don't get the payoff at the end. They wouldn't care about it. And your job as a founder or a leader of a company is to make the world care about what you're doing as much as you do. And so story's great at helping us kind of make other people care about what we're doing.

[00:28:54] And so thinking about your story of your business in that kind of three act way and going out and telling that whole story in that way is a really kind of simple, really powerful kind of hack to use to, you know, use story to your advantage. And it still helps create that emotional connection and build that brand through the story. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. So you've worked with a lot of brands and you talk about that there's a lot of data behind this, like science-based advertising. Have you worked with brands?

[00:29:25] I mean, one thing when you, you know, before the podcast, you also talked about the role that chance and luck plays, right? For better or worse. So, you know, I'm just curious, have you worked with brands? Obviously, I'm sure you've seen a lot of successes, but for some brands, maybe they've followed the advice and they haven't seen that success. What is your feedback? Is it maybe they were focused on a wrong market, wrong product? I don't know, business model.

[00:29:48] What do you see the reasons that even though brands are investing in brand building, that they still, even after a year or two, they still can't find their groove or their sweet spot? What advice do you give those companies? Yeah. So there's a few lenses to look at this through. So first, you know, the really important thing to understand is that brand building is really powerful, but it's not the only thing that you need to be good at. Right. Great companies are good at everything. They're great at the product. They're great at pricing it the right way.

[00:30:17] They're great at getting it out and getting it distributed. They're great at promoting it. They're great at operations. They're great at financial management. They're great at leadership. They're great at customer service. They're great at all of these things. Right. I'm just doing fantastic brand work. If you've got those other fundamentals, they're not in place. Advertising doesn't cause sales. It just kind of directs people towards that sale.

[00:30:46] If you've got a shitty product or it's too expensive or too cheap or, you know, the customer experience is terrible or, you know, any of these things, the brand building and the advertising isn't going to make up for any of that. So I think sometimes we need to have a really good, honest review of, you know, what's the problem here? Is it the advertising and the brand building stuff that we're doing or do we not have the right products? Right.

[00:31:11] And so a lot of startups find or spend their first couple of years finding product market fit. And that's about sort of finding that absolute kind of surety that the market wants the products that you've got and they're willing to pay for it. And that sales process is quite easy. If you haven't found that yet, brand building is not going to help you find it. You probably don't have an awareness problem. You've probably got a product problem or, you know, some other kind of problem in the business.

[00:31:39] So, I mean, that's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, like anything, the quality of brand building and advertising that we do is correlated pretty closely with its success. So if we're putting work out into the world that actually isn't that great or where we think we're doing brand building, but actually what all we mean is we're making ads on traditional media, which are actually still just like features and benefits led.

[00:32:09] And they're not really doing that job of brand building. They're just trying to do that sales job with, you know, a much bigger budget on much bigger media. You know, again, you're not going to see the same results. So there's quite a lot to it. It's quite hard to kind of, you know, encapsulate it at all in a podcast episode. But of course. Yeah, there's, you know, like anything, there's great brand building work, there's great advertising and there's brand building work and advertising.

[00:32:35] And so, you know, getting better at it is the name of the game. Right. And I think, you know, just the nature of startups that are always looking for product market fit, always experimenting, you know, like is recommended to do in, you know, the lean startup or what have you. That could be a challenge, right, to build that brand when you're always shifting your own product and market. So I understood the challenge is there. Yeah. Well, James, this has been fantastic. Is there any other advice? I think we've covered a lot of ground.

[00:33:03] You've definitely changed the way that I think about brand building, that it's not just a luxury, it's a necessity. So thank you for converting me. But any other advice you'd like to give our listeners around the subject? Yeah. What's a good parting shot? I think, you know, we've talked a bit about the science. And, you know, science, sometimes we think about it as being able to test in a way that we know something's going to work.

[00:33:28] When really science, the marketing science is about understanding how things do work, sort of really do work in marketing, how consumers and markets really operate, and then kind of responding to that. It's very hard to kind of test our way to success. But it's very easy to learn about these basic principles that are pretty timeless and very, very broad. We've studied them in large markets in the world, in small markets, in every different category.

[00:33:56] And they're very robust principles if you sort of dig into them and learn about them. And the trap that people often fall into is they believe they're different, right? They believe my business is totally different to every other business. It's not going to conform to those same things that, you know, Coca-Cola do because we're much smaller and we're blah, blah, blah. Or that's worked in, you know, America, but it almost certainly wouldn't work in my market. Or, you know, everyone considers themselves a snowflake. But when we look at the danger, it's just untrue.

[00:34:25] Like there is a bunch of kind of physics of marketing that's really true for anyone, you know, and it's a bit like the physics of gravity, right? It doesn't matter if you're in China or in America or in New Zealand, the gravity still pulls you down to the ground. And it doesn't matter if you're, you know, in 1842 or 2024, the gravity still pulls you down. You know, there are these principles, these physics-like principles of marketing that just always work everywhere. If you ignore them, then you put yourself at enormous risk of failure.

[00:34:54] If you really understand them and lean into them, you can really use them to your advantage. And that's not really about sort of testing executions and getting down to that level. It's about adhering to those principles and doing things in accordance with them. And that will always pay off. Well said, my friend. I found myself in my latest book quoting from, you know, people from 100 years ago. Case in point. So, yeah, what's old is new. It may not be the sexiest, but it's time in, time out. It works. So great parting advice.

[00:35:23] James, I know you're previously unavailable. Your website is previously.co. Any other place that we can send our listeners? And I'm assuming that you also work, although you're based in New Zealand, you know, I'm in Southern California, just like we're having this conversation. You work with companies around the world. But any other place that we can send our listeners? Yeah. Yeah. If you go to jamesherman.com, that's J-A-M-E-S-H-U-R-M-A-N.com, there's a bunch of stuff there that you can read through, a bunch of the sort of marketing science stuff, the research

[00:35:51] that I've done and talks I've given and books I've written and all that kind of stuff. So there's a whole lot there to explore too. Fantastic. And, you know, in the age of generative AI, we're talking about how we need to double down on being human and double down on branding. And so it's a very, very timely, although the principles might be evergreen, you know, I think you'd agree it's more important than ever today with the prevalence of AI to really lean into those principles even more. So thank you for this timely conversation and for sharing all your advice. My pleasure. Thank you, Neil.

[00:36:21] All right. You know, I challenged James and he challenged me. So I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. Hey, did you know that all of the interviews that I do for the podcast are actually live streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and they're archived on YouTube. If you were to go to youtube.com slash Neil Schaefer, you'll be able to catch all the interview and future podcast episodes because I do have a backlog right now on the YouTube channel. Once again, youtube.com slash Neil Schaefer.

[00:36:51] And that's it for another, hopefully you agree, insightful episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilschafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafer.com to tap in to the 400

[00:37:19] plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.