How Creativity Leads to Better Results in B2B Marketing

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be speaking with James Hurman. He’s part entrepreneur, part brand strategist, part VC (Venture Capital), part advertising effectiveness expert, part company leader and part author. He’s also the founder of Previously Unavailable, an Innovation Studio that provides new product, brand and business, design and development, innovation and customer experience consulting. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:36

Okay. Mr. James Hurman, welcome to the show, Sir. 

James Hurman  00:41

Thanks, Christian. It’s awesome to be here all the way from New Zealand, the first cloudy day we’ve had in ages. It’s been a beautiful summer here and now we’re, yeah, heading into cloudier times. 

Christian Klepp  00:54

Ah, then you should, you should come to Toronto, because we’ve had cloudy days for about six months, but like a pretty long and cold winter, but we’re slowly coming out of that. The snow is melting and what have you. So we’re looking forward to spring, and I know that in the southern hemisphere, it’s the reverse, and that that just makes it all interesting, doesn’t it? 

James Hurman  01:14

Sure it does. 

Christian Klepp  01:15

James, I’m so glad to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because this topic, I think, is also near and dear to my heart, and I will keep the audience in suspense for a little while longer before we dive into it. All right, so I’m just going to start off by saying that you’ve been on a mission to help companies understand that when they’re more creative, they’re more successful. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I would say is going to be very useful and pertinent to B2B marketers. So what am I talking about? It’s how advertising with great creative qualities leads to better results. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with this question, why do you think that creativity is so often overlooked in B2B?

James Hurman  02:03

Yeah, I think there’s probably a number of reasons. One is that B2B hasn’t got into the habit of being creative, right in the same way that B2C marketers have been for a long time. And so that can make it feel, I think, to B2B marketers, that creativity is not the way, because not many people are doing creativity and and and reach a sort of erroneous conclusion, I think that, you know, others have figured out how marketing works and B2B, and it’s not creative, and that’s how it works. So that’s how we should do it, which the data doesn’t support. 

James Hurman  02:39

I think the other reason is we tend to think of B2B, you know, business as a serious thing, right? And we ought to be, you know, very professional in business, and doing anything that’s too kind of fun or too creative might leave people with the impression that we’re not a serious business, right? Which, again, the data does not support. And I remember a long, a long time ago now, it was probably back in the kind of mid 2000s. I worked, I was the planner on the Vodafone Business in New Zealand, so big telco, and they had obviously a consumer retail kind of side to their business, and they had a business team, right? And they were a B2B, telco too. And their business team were really, really resistant to the consumer brand doing anything that was kind of too fun or too creative, because they thought that it would impact poorly on their business customers perceptions of Vodafone being a serious business telco provider. 

James Hurman  03:54

And I remember looking at the looking at the data and and being able to show them that actually, if you look at their business brand metrics around, you know, trust and professionalism and all that kind of stuff, when the consumer side of the business did do something that was creative and fun and sort of noisy, and, you know, they the business metrics went up, not down, right? 

James Hurman  04:21

And so we could prove pretty easily, right, that when the consumer side of the business did something really creative, the business side of the business did better because of it. And so this kind of idea that we, you know, we mustn’t be too fun or creative and business, you know, it’s it doesn’t play out in the data and the reality and so so I think, you know, that’s probably the other reason people just feel like it’s sort of not the right thing to do. But in fact, certainly in my experience and when we look into, you know, the data, or in B2B advertising effectiveness. Uh, creativity works just the same for businesses as it does for consumer brands. 

Christian Klepp  05:06

Absolutely, absolutely. And I know we’re gonna get into the meat of that in a second, but I did have one follow up question for you, James, and I’m probably, I’m almost confident you’ve heard this more times than you care to account, especially in the world of B2B marketing, I say there’s, there’s a camp that says, oh, you know what? We should draw inspiration from B2C and use those B2C playbooks for B2B marketing, because, you know, it’s to inject that much more creativity into all these initiatives that we’re rolling out. But I’ve also encountered B2B marketers from the other camp that are saying that that’s absolute nonsense, and that they’re saying, Oh, that’s a very dangerous mindset to have, because B2B doesn’t operate the same way. What are your thoughts on that? 

James Hurman  05:57

I think there are certainly some differences in B2B marketing, right? So I think there are certain aspects, like, you know, there’s a lot of sort of sales enablement and B2B marketing, right? So, so really trying to generate warm leads for the sales team and, and that’s different in B2C. You don’t usually have that sort of, that, same sort of link between sales and marketing. 

James Hurman  06:24

I think there are certain channel differences, like, you know, with our B2B brands here in New Zealand, we use LinkedIn lots, right? We do lots of marketing on LinkedIn, which we wouldn’t really do for our consumer brands. So there are some differences, right? The audience is a bit different. The way, the way it all works, is a bit different. But I’m probably talking about, you know, between 2% and 5% of of marketing is different and needs to be, kind of, you know, approached slightly differently. The other 95% is exactly the same. The way that brands grow, the way that advertising works, is exactly the same in B2B as it is in B2C. And, you know, and we’ve really, over the last, certainly, kind of 15 years, as we’ve gotten, you know, much more advertising and marketing effectiveness data, much more of a marketing science community. Those organizations and researchers have now done really, really significant research on how marketing and advertising really do work, and that’s all very evidence based and backed up with, you know, big data sets and and principles that are found uniformly across those data sets and, and that’s largely, you know, at the start, largely happened in B2C. 

James Hurman  07:54

And then what happened was two really clever guys, John and Peter from LinkedIn B2B Institute, they started to ask us and the effectiveness community, can we, kind of, can we replicate these studies using B2B data? And so the Ehrenberg-Bass did a big, a big project with LinkedIn B2B Institute to see do the principles in how brands grow, and the principles that they’ve found at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, do they hold true and B2B? And they found, they absolutely did. Peter Field and Les Binet, you know, the principles in big studies, like The Long and the Short of It, do they hold true and B2B? Yes, they do. Me what the… We reproduced, a big study I did called the Effectiveness Code with B2B brands. Do the principles hold true? Yes, they do. And so we’ve really, there’s been a lot of work to kind of really check. You know, does marketing work differently in B2B, and can we find differences? And as I say, we can find some small differences, but largely it’s it’s all, it’s all just the same. 

James Hurman  09:06

So I think using the B2C playbook, I wouldn’t call it using the B2C playbook. I think that language is like, it does feel like, why are we using a  B2C playbook in B2B? I would actually reference it as using the marketing playbook, which has now been really well established, proven out with a great deal of evidence, and so I would regard it as using the kind of evidence based marketing playbook in B2B. That would be, you know, that would be better language to use. And if you do use that playbook, the results are incredibly predictable. So it’s, you know, it’s really good to understand all of that marketing science and effectiveness research and apply it to our brands, because it really does work.

Speaker 1  09:56

Absolutely, absolutely, I love how you keep going back to… that it’s evidence based, and going back to the data that’s available to prove this, and it’s the planner in you are coming out, obviously.

James Hurman  10:09

Yeah, and I think we should, you know, we ought to be evidence based, right? We ought to take the scientific approach to this, and we can, and we have, and I think it’s a really good thing that marketing and advertising have gone from, you know, up until the 2000s really being a whole lot of reckons about how these things work, and lots of sort of noisy voices and opinions and philosophy and all the rest of it to this century really kind of going, Okay, well, let’s really test that out. You know, which of those philosophies and perspectives and ideas are right and which are wrong? 

James Hurman  10:46

And now that we’ve got these huge data sets of effectiveness data, we can, we can look at those and ask those questions. You know, how do things work? Do they work in the way that we thought, that they did? Do they not? And what we’ve found is that sometimes we were right, and things do work the way we thought, and sometimes we were dead wrong and they didn’t. They, in fact, don’t work the way that we thought. And that’s, that’s a real enlightenment, right? That’s an enlightenment moment for marketing and advertising, and it’s awesome that it’s happened and so. So, you know, there’s no reason not to understand all of that and apply it to what we do.

Christian Klepp  10:46

Absolutely, absolutely. So I’m going to move us on to the next question, which is, what are you know from your point of view, what are some of the untapped opportunities you see in B2B when it comes to creative work?

James Hurman  11:38

Ah, there are just so many untapped opportunities. 

Christian Klepp  11:41

I know, I know. 

James Hurman  11:45

I think what the like the biggest untapped opportunity is just the fact that very few B2B brands market themselves particularly well. And when you’re in that environment like, over my career, I’ve really, like, there been so many examples of going into a category that maybe you know is historically not really being very creative and doing more creative things. And you actually stand out in that context a whole lot more than if you go into categories where there’s already lots of creativity, right? 

James Hurman  12:25

So B2B is, is a world where there hasn’t been much creativity, there hasn’t been much really, truly great brand building and so you it’s quite easy to gain an advantage over your competitors and your category as a B2B brand, if you deploy creativity in the right way, because very few others are doing it. And so that presents like an amazing opportunity, I think, and I think about what we did. So we in our company, we create companies. So we created a brand tracking business called Tracksuit, which now operates in North America and your market. And it’s growing pretty fast up there, and and, and, you know, market research has not, you know, traditionally been the most exciting end of marketing and advertising, and the market research brands are pretty dull, right? 

James Hurman  13:25

And what we did when we created Tracksuit was we thought, you know, we need to be a brand that celebrates brand building that is out there in the industry being a kind of a… being a really fun partner to marketers and brand builders and so we like when I do, when I speak on behalf of Tracksuit at conferences, I wear a tracksuit, right? Because tracksuits are kind of funny and fun and cool and, and the whole brand, really is, it’s packed with kind of energy and fun and spirit and, you know, and, and the products the same, you know, it’s kind of, it’s really beautifully designed product. And again, which is, stands against a lot of the, you know, traditionally quite, quite poor or quite clunky design in the market research industry. And we are just killing it right where Tracksuit is one of the fastest growing startups ever out of New Zealand. We are just on the most amazing growth path. As people are drawn toward the Tracksuit brand. They want to be part of this world. And, you know, and we are, you know, a brand that’s very creative and very fun. And, you know, if you follow the, you know, the idea that business doesn’t care for that sort of stuff, then we should not be growing as quickly as we’re growing, right? 

James Hurman  14:59

And so I think, you know, for us going into market research, and we’ve now done two companies and in that space, Tracksuit so, and another one called Ideally. Ideally is kind of rapid research platform for very fast, very affordable kind of concept testing. So it’s a real kind of, it’s a great research platform for creativity and that’s also, you know, similarly, that’s a really beautifully designed, fun brand out in the world doing cool stuff and, and that’s also growing very, very, very quickly. And so what we’ve done is gone. We can go into this kind of historically boring category. We can be fun cool brands. And that will give us a huge advantage over all of the others. And that is playing out absolutely, you know, right? Those two companies have created in the last four years, something in the order of $400 million in enterprise value. So, you know, that’s the opportunity, I think, to if you’re playing in a B2B category, and it’s pretty dull, and you are the one that like actually looks fun and attractive and creative and all the rest of it, you will have a big advantage over your competitors.

Christian Klepp  16:10

Wow, that’s incredible. And we’ll be sure to include the links to those companies in the show notes. Thanks for sharing that, James, you actually answered… kind of answer, one of the follow up questions I had, right? Because I’ve been dealing with this like pretty much throughout my professional career, right? Because I’ve been mostly on the B2B side of things, and I’ve always been running up against this brick wall, if you will, where people are like, No, we can’t be that creative because it’s B2B. I mean, you know, we’ve had this conversation before, right? It’s going to be factual, it’s going to be logical, it shouldn’t have any emotion in it. 

Christian Klepp  16:48

And at the end of the day, Christian, boring wins in B2B, right? And I know that you strongly disagree with that, right? And the second bit, which you’ve kind of answered already, but I’d like to unpack that a bit further, because I know you can answer that, but for those folks who are B2B marketers out there that are listening to this conversation that you and I are having and thinking to themselves, you know what this James guy has really inspired me to like do something different, but I’m never going to get buy in to do something creative from a senior management consisting of, well, people in a non marketing role, right? So here comes the question, what advice would you give them to address or deal with this pushback? 

James Hurman  17:37

Yeah, and it’s the same in B2C, frankly, right the you know, I think in B2C, although the marketers, at least the ones that I deal with, are pretty fluent in this kind of marketing science, effectiveness research stuff, they kind of know it, they understand it, they buy into it, they want to do it. But often they have non marketing stakeholders within their B2C organizations that are pretty resistant to some of the ideas because their views were formed a long time ago about how marketing works when we, you know, there were lots of fallacious ideas kind of floating around. And so often it’s the same in B2C. You know, how do we convince our non marketing stakeholders to let us do the work that we know we ought to be doing. 

James Hurman  18:21

And so in B2B, just like in B2C, it’s about education. There’s no one easy answer or one quick chart that I can give you, that you can show, you know, show your executive team or your board or whoever, and they’ll instantly become advocates for all of the, you know, right ways to do marketing. You’ve got to take them on a journey, and it does take a bit of time, and it requires educating them with all of this data and with all of this research and and showing that to them, and showing it to them many times over time, you know, and really setting up a, you know, almost a function within your marketing team, which is about educating the non marketing stakeholders who have influence over the process, and going to them and saying, look, we’ve got, we’ve now got a lot of evidence right about how things work and and I really want to take you through that so that we can both be working from the same kind of body of knowledge as we’re decision making about what we do and what we don’t do. And so actually gathering up all of that stuff, gather up the stuff from the B2B Institute. 

James Hurman  19:34

It’s all free. You can access it. You don’t need to pay them anything to do that. You know, read through all of that and figure out what the important bits of data that we need to show the rest of the business to help them understand how we’re seeing things and that’s a process that, like I said before, it’s not one and done. It would be great if it was, but it just doesn’t. You need to kind of spend time. And, you know, trying to on a regular rhythm, kind of get together with those people, show them, remind them, you know, and eventually they will come around. You know, people are teachable. And most people, you know, it’s, it’s not that they’re stopping you because they’re idiots or it’s because they’ve just, they’ve got an idea about how things work that’s been stuck in their heads for ages, and you need to sort of help them unlearn that and learn what the evidence really says. And so take them on that journey. That’s the way to do it. 

Christian Klepp  20:39

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It certainly is a journey. And as I like to say, You got to roll that out in phases, right? Like, similar to the way that you would roll out a campaign, the way that you would educate senior management is in stages. Because if you give it to them in one go, it’s just going to be overwhelming. 

James Hurman  20:59

Yeah. It’s totally Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  21:00

It’s like, if a CFO came to you one day and, you know, he started talking like, you know, talking about financials, and he walks you through that in one hour, your head will melt.

James Hurman  21:11

Exactly, yeah. So you do it over time. Chunk it down. Do it over time. Keep reminding and eventually, you know, eventually they’ll come around. I think the other thing that is, sometimes there’s quite an aha moment for people, is this reality that in any market, whether it’s a B2B or B2C, market, doesn’t matter. In any market, at any point in time, there’s a small group of people who are in the market and ready to buy, and there’s a much larger group of people who will definitely come into the category at some point in future, but are not ready to buy just yet. 

James Hurman  21:53

Now, when I talk at conferences, I often do this, this audience participation thing, where I say, you know, can you put your hand up if you’re in the process of buying a new mobile phone at the moment? And say, there’s 100 people, you know, maybe two or three of them put their hand up. And then I say, Okay, can you put your hand up if you think you’ll buy a new mobile phone sometime in the next two years? And everyone puts their hands up, right? And that’s a demonstration of the fact that in any market, there’s a few people that are in the market ready to buy right now and a whole lot of people who aren’t. 

James Hurman  22:26

And we’ve got this, we’ve one of the sort of myths about how marketing and advertising works is that it causes sales to happen that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, like this sort of funny idea that if we go out with a great ad, it will make people buy. In fact, what advertising does in the short term is it just speaks to that small group who are in the market, and hopefully says something that, you know, means that they’ll choose us instead of our competitors. But it doesn’t make people that aren’t in the market come into the market. You know, very, very rarely does that happen and B2B, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute estimated that about 5% of people are in B2B. Customers are in market at any point in time, and about 95% of them are not, but they will come into the category later. 

James Hurman  23:18

Now, the thing about marketing and building brands like how it works is that we’ve got two jobs to do. One is to do that sort of short term, quite sales focused stuff, to convert the current demand in the market. And our other job is to create future demand by warming up all of those people who come into the category, you know, next month or next year, making them more familiar with us and making them feel good about us, so that when they come into the category, they gravitate towards us and they spend more with us. You know, that’s really what the role of brand building is, is all about, and I’ve recently done some research in in the United States markets, just assessing the shape of different categories. So, you know, for example, in the in the telco, telecom, mobile phone, kind of space, same as I do my thing on stage, and it shows that there’s probably about 10% of people in the market for a new mobile phone at any, you know, any given kind of you know, month or whatever, and and 90% are not, but they will come to the category later. 

James Hurman  24:28

And most categories, with the exception of something like milk, which is bought every day, just about nothing is bought every day, right? Even, like most FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) categories, like you’ll buy from that category maybe once every six months, something like that. And so most people spend most of their time, not in the market, but they will come into later. That’s often, often quite a kind of eye opener for people to think about their marketing like that. You know, marketing is not sales. Sales is sitting in front of genuine kind of, you know, qualified leads, and giving them a sales pitch because they are in the market and they’re ready to buy, marketing is not doing that, right? Marketing is talking to a much broader audience, of people who are not qualified leads. They will come into the category later. We can do the salesy stuff with them, but in terms of warming them up, we need to talk to that much bigger audience and grow our familiarity. 

James Hurman  25:22

You know, research shows that in B2B procurement processes, if you have low brand familiarity, like you’re a brand that hasn’t been, you know, is not familiar to the procurement team or whoever’s making the decision on what they purchase. If you’re an unknown, or if you’re unfamiliar, you are not likely to be chosen. Doesn’t matter how good your product is. Doesn’t matter how good you know the proposal that you put in is, procurement teams, businesses, B2B buyers. They gravitate towards brands that they were familiar with before the procurement process started. And that’s exactly how it works in B2C. It’s exactly how marketing works everywhere. So a big part of our job is to make sure that we don’t get out of that procurement list, and we’re really unfamiliar brand to the procurement team or the people that are making the decision. We’ve got to do that work to give ourselves a much greater chance of making the sale. So that’s what brand building is in B2B, just as it is in B2C.

Christian Klepp  26:23

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It’s a trust and credibility building exercise, really. And, you know, I’m going to oversimplify what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, but it’s the whole like, know, like and trust, yeah?

James Hurman  26:36

You know what it’s not even that like, trust and credibility. Like, yeah, sort of but that doesn’t mean we need to do ads that go for trust and credibility and have also your sensible information. It’s really like, a big, big, big part of it, Christian, is just being familiar.

Christian Klepp  26:56

Yes. 

James Hurman  26:57

Right? Just having people have heard your brand name and seen it around a bunch, right? That does most of the heavy lifting, just that familiarity. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t know just about anything about you, or you haven’t done anything to convince them that your products are very good and, you know, trustworthy, and all the rest of it, like familiarity actually breeds trust by itself. We tend to, you know, our human brain, the way that we are wired, we automatically trust things that we’re more familiar with more right? And, and that’s, you know, and that is just that’s been proven out in the behavioral science. The familiarity bias is a very real thing. We choose things that we’re more familiar with, despite them often not being, you know, functionally the better choice. And that’s how it is.

Christian Klepp  27:49

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. Staying on this topic, what are some of the key pitfalls that B2B marketers should pay attention to, and what should they be doing instead?

James Hurman  28:00

Yeah, I mean, one of the pitfalls is just budget and how that’s, you know, how that’s spent, you know, B2B, brands tend to spend far too little on, you know, on marketing, again, one of the kind of principles and the effectiveness research is something called Extra Share of Voice, when we spend relatively more than our competitors, spend relative to our our market share size, we we we grow, and when we don’t, we we shrink. 

James Hurman  28:30

So what the really interesting research that’s been done shows is say, if we have a 10% market share, if our share of voice, our share of spend, is also 10% we’re likely to maintain the market share that we’ve got. If it’s 15% and we’re at 10% market share, but our share of spend, or share of voice is 15% we’re likely to grow, and if our share of voice is only 5% we’re likely to decline in market share. So there is real evidence that how much we spend relative to our size and our competitors really underpins whether we grow or whether we don’t. And I think and B2B, marketing budgets don’t usually take those sorts of aspects into account. And and, you know, a lot of the time the marketing budget is sort of like just what’s left over after everything else is being bought that year. You know?

Christian Klepp  29:24

Not even that sometimes…

James Hurman  29:26

Yeah, so, so budget is important, you know, it’s, it’s, as Liz Bennett once said, you know, you can’t, you know, there’s the you can’t underspend, but no, you’ve got to spend money. But no one wants to hear that, you know, and so, but it is a reality. And when you look at, you know, the largest technology businesses, so everyone, you know, there’s this kind of, really, there’s this big myth that those kind of modern technology businesses don’t spend any money on advertising or brand building or any of that kind of stuff. You know, Amazon doesn’t do it, and Google doesn’t do it, and Meta doesn’t do it. And, you know, and all these companies have proven that if you just build a great product, then people will come to it and you don’t need to worry about all that fluffy brand stuff. 

James Hurman  30:19

And last year, probably five of those tech brands, so certainly, Amazon spent more than $20 billion on advertising. They’re the biggest advertiser in the world. Google, about 8 billion. Meta, about three. I think. Spending billions of dollars on advertising. Very unusual those companies, you know, there’s about five companies that make up about 5% of total global ad spend. You know, five companies. There are millions of advertisers in the world, right? These companies advertise way, way, way, way more than the average company does. So there’s a bit of a myth there. 

James Hurman  31:02

They spend an awful lot of money on advertising and so, and they obviously are kind of… they are B2B businesses, or at least they’re partially B2B businesses, and so spend is important. So, that’s probably number one. You know, just not spending enough money to actually underpin growth for your business. 

James Hurman  31:25

I think, secondly, that you know that the targeting pitfall, you know, it feels like we just want to target people who might buy our product. So how do we kind of, you know, get really, really niche on kind of identifying the perfect person within a business who’s might want to buy our product, and sort of really trying to just target them, and forgetting that there’s actually many, many influencers in a B2B purchase, right? That famous line, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. What they didn’t mean by that is that no one got fired for buying IBM because IBM’s products are the best. What they meant by that is no one got fired for buying IBM because everyone from the CEO to the most junior person in the organization had heard of IBM. Kind of knew IBM were a, kind of, you know, big company, and so if you chose IBM, no one else in the organization was going to go, that’s a weird choice. They were all going to go, Oh, I’ve heard of that. That sounds sensible. 

James Hurman  32:30

So they built their brand IBM in a way that made them a kind of obvious choice, because it was such a familiar brand to so many people. So actually, B2B brands, you know, if you want to get get very big, if you want to grow into a very big brand, you actually are best to talk to the whole market, like people who in companies, right, which is kind of just about everyone, and build your brand among those people, and you know, go really make sure that you’re a familiar choice, not only to the procurement person or the particular person that you’re trying to sell to, but that you’re also familiar to the people around them, because those people will influence that decision, sometimes directly, and sometimes they’ll influence it, because that procurement person or that buyer will go, I want to make a choice that I think everyone else in the organization will kind of understand and won’t penalize me for going off on one and choosing like a weird thing they’ve never heard of before. Because if that doesn’t work out, right, if something goes wrong, or the product’s not as good as we thought it was going to be, or whatever, right, I’m going to get the blame for choosing the thing that no one’s ever heard of. 

James Hurman  33:45

So it’s really important for us to actually build the brand among the employees of the business that we work for, as much as the sort of person who’s in charge of the buying decision. So that’s one, targeting, I think, like woefully underspending on brand. So once you’ve got budget in place, kind of in B2B, you should be spending about half of it on brand building, and about half of it on more sales focused advertising. And so when you’re doing that more sales focused advertising, you’re trying to convert the current demand in the market, and you want to be doing the type of advertising that does that, but more informational, doesn’t need to be that creative. You’re talking to people who are in the market looking to make a decision at the moment. They’re looking for information to help them make that decision. The brand building job is completely different. So you’re talking to those people that won’t come into the… won’t come into the category until sometime down the track and they have no need for your information at that point, they will just filter it out. They will ignore it completely. 

James Hurman  34:08

What our game is with those people is to do something that grabs their attention and makes them remember us, so that when they come into the market, you know, they feel familiar with us. They remember us. That requires a totally different style of advertising, informational advertising doesn’t work at all because, as I said, we just filter out irrelevant information. And we do that completely subconsciously, and we’re very good at it. And so there’s no point trying to put information, give information to people. They’ll just filter it out. We remember feelings far more than, far longer than we remember facts. Again, there’s lots of science around this. If you tell people a fact, they will have forgotten it by tomorrow or next week. If you make them feel a certain way, they’ll remember that feeling for much, much, much longer, like many months, many years. 

James Hurman  35:39

And so if we’re trying to get people to remember us when they come into the category in six months time, we’re much better to leave them with a feeling than a fact. And that’s why emotional advertising works much better for creating future demand and building our brand among future customers. 

James Hurman  35:55

And then creativity, the reason creativity is so effective, particularly at creating future demand, particularly about at sort of speaking to that much broader group, is that, like I said before, if the category is is not something they’re shopping at the moment, they’re not interested in ads for it, and So you can’t you need to actually earn their attention, rather than them just giving it to you, right? So let me give you an example. Are you Christian in the market for buying a commercial truck?

Christian Klepp  36:33

No.

James Hurman  36:35

Have you ever been?

Christian Klepp  36:36

 No.

James Hurman  36:37

Do you think you ever will be?

Christian Klepp  36:38

No. 

James Hurman  36:40

Until you watch an ad with Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits on two reversing Volvo Trucks. 

Christian Klepp  36:47

Yeah? 

James Hurman  36:49

Why you have no… you will never have any need to buy a commercial truck. It’s completely irrelevant to you. It’s a total waste of your time to watch that ad, right? It’s a completely irrational thing to do. You shouldn’t have watched that ad, waste of time, but you did. Why did you? Because it was creative and it earned your attention.

Christian Klepp  37:10

Right.

James Hurman  37:11

Right? And that’s a B2B ad, right? That’s a B2B ad talking to truck procurement people. That is the case for creativity in B2B marketing, you need to speak to a whole group of people who aren’t interested in your category right now. You need to do something that earns their attention. And creativity does that and that’s how you know that’s why we ought to be more creative in B2B marketing.

Christian Klepp  37:38

No, fantastic, fantastic. No, absolutely. Well, I probably, what I keep telling myself is the reason why I watched that ad is because Jean-Claude Van Damme was one of my childhood action heroes. Which movies come to mind are Double Impact, Bloodsport, you name it, right? I’ve watched them all and yeah, but, but, but the fact that he did the split on the truck. 

James Hurman  38:04

Yeah.

James Hurman  38:06

And that’s another sort of pitfall, not just in B2B, but in role of marketing is, is they invested a lot in the execution of that ad, right? So it would have cost them lots of money to get Jean-Claude Van Damme, that ad was beautifully, you know, shot and produced. They would have spent quite a bit of money on executing that ad. What the data really tells us is, when we’re converting current demand doing that more short term or informational advertising, it doesn’t, you know, executional quality matters a lot less. We can sort of, you know, put something together, as long as it’s not completely rubbish. You know, it’s fine. 

Christian Klepp  38:06

That’s what brought me.

James Hurman  38:41

When we are creating future demand talking to that much bigger audience. Executional quality actually comes, actually becomes really, really important. Spending enough on production to earn people’s attention and to leave positive memories in their heads for when they come into the category later, production and execution or craft quality plays a really big role in that. So we see it in the numbers. It’s actually, you know, when we’re doing that, more long, longer term form of marketing and advertising, the campaigns that spent a larger amount of their production, their total budget on production and and really worked at the… making the executional craft really, really great. Those, those do a whole lot better, and and so. So sometimes we think, like, now that we’ve got the idea, shouldn’t we just find the most cost effective way of producing this idea? And that’s not the case. 

James Hurman  39:37

You look at the movie industry, right? The movie industry spends usually about 97 to 98% of the budget goes on the execution. About two or 3% is spent on the script, right? So the idea they, you know, the idea is, needs to be executed really, really well. And when you look at the dynamics of the firm. Industry is this really paradoxical thing where really big budget films are actually a lot less risky than small budget films. So what the movie industry has learned is, if we spend a lot of money on executing this thing, amazingly, then lots and lots of people will come to the theaters and watch it. And if we make something which is executed a little bit more, kind of modestly, it’s likely to be a complete flop. So small movies, small budget movies, lose a lot more money than big budget movies, and so and are actually more risky than big budget movies. So, you know, this is something that that you know, again, sort of tells us the importance of executional excellence. You know, it does make a huge difference. And if the movie industry said, Great, now that we’ve got this great script, how can we make it as cost effectively as possible, the movie industry would not be the huge industry that it is. And, and, yeah, so execution is really important.

Christian Klepp  40:57

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and you’ve given us a lot already, but like, if you were to advise B2B marketers to do talk about three to five things that they can do right now, not in six months, not in 12 months, like right now. What they can do in terms of leveraging creativity to generate better results for B2B? What would those things be?

James Hurman  41:26

I think, first thing, go to the B2B Institute website and download all the research reports and read them again. That doesn’t cost you anything. They’re not particularly arduous to sort of read and you’ll get a lot out of it.

James Hurman  41:42

Secondly, like we were saying about non marketing stakeholders, like, just, just put a little plan together, you know, how could we on a monthly rhythm, you know, get the important people that weigh in on marketing? How could we get them in a room for half an hour and tell them about one of those reports, or one of those bits of information, you know, help them understand there’s now lots of science and research and evidence around how marketing works, and begin to take them on that journey. 

James Hurman  42:11

Third, I’d think about, you know that that difference between current demand and future demand in your category right. Who are the customers that are in the market right now? Who are the one? Who are all the ones that will come into the market later? And and think about how you might sort of separate out those two jobs and do them with a different style of advertising and, and I don’t mean completely different, like, still have one brand look and feel, you know, you can still have one kind of, you know, brand platform for your brand. It’s just that when you execute that, you know, do it in a more creative, emotional way to build your brand among those future customers, and do it in a more sort of informational, functional way when you talk to those that are currently in market. So you know, have a think about that. How many is that? 

Christian Klepp  43:05

Those are good. 

James Hurman  43:06

Yeah. I mean, I think those would be a really good place to to kind of start, and, and, yeah. And, I guess the other thing about creativity is it helps to work with really good creative people. So, you know, think about who are you using to make that kind of work? Are they… You know, is it the best agency, or are you working with the best creative people? Because they really do make a difference. You know, creative people have spent their lives doing creative things. They are very good at it, and that’s valuable, and they’ll get you to a better place than you know, if you’ve got an internal kind of team, you know, they will probably be really good for the sort of day to day stuff. But, you know, you really want great creative people working on that, that longer term advertising, you know, people who really understand how to have great ideas and craft them beautifully, and all of that’s important. So think that’s another thing to, you know, for B2B marketers to think about.

Christian Klepp  44:10

Well, absolutely, absolutely. It goes back to the point you were making a couple of minutes ago about the importance of the quality of the execution, right? 

James Hurman  44:20

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. It’s a signal, like, if you want people to feel that your business and your product is of a high quality, right, when you execute your marketing with a really high quality, it sends a signal to people. There was a really interesting study done at the Stockholm School of Economics back in about 2009 by a team there who they showed… they got 1000 people. They split them into two groups of 500 people. They showed one of those groups. They got them to look at an ad for a brand that was not particularly creative and not particularly well executed. They got the other group to look at an ad for the same product from the same brand, and it was creative and much more well executed then what they did afterwards is they asked a series of questions, not about the ad, but about the company behind the ad. And they asked questions like, do you think that this is a company that we’re spending more on? Do you think this is a company that makes high quality products, these sorts of questions, and the group that had seen the more creative advertising gave the company much higher scores on those metrics. 

James Hurman  44:22

So what they sort of managed to prove out was that advertising, you know, in one sense, is about communicating a message about a product or a brand. Another sense, it’s about communicating something bigger about the company, right? If the company puts this much effort into their advertising, they probably put this much effort into everything else that they do. And if a company puts a very small amount of effort into their marketing and advertising, and it’s not very good, then they probably don’t put much effort, you know, into everything else that they do. So bearing in mind that you know when, when we advertise, we kind of we send signals to people about how good we are at everything. And so that’s another reason to, you know, produce good marketing that’s people. People judge us on what we put out into the world. And so if you put out rubbish, what are people going to conclude? 

Christian Klepp  46:34

Absolutely, absolutely, I would even dare say that this is probably one of those situations where you should be judging a book by its cover.

James Hurman  46:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 

Christian Klepp  46:48

All right, James, thanks again for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. I mean, this was such a great conversation. I was furiously writing notes as you were talking, but please a quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

James Hurman  47:05

Sure. Hello, I’m James, so I spend a lot of my time on marketing and advertising effectiveness, writing, publishing, research around that, and books and so the book you can get a hold of, which talks a bit about some of the concepts we’ve been talking about today, is called Future Demand. So if you just have a search for that, you can download the eBook off Amazon, or you can buy a physical book from my company’s website, but you’ll find it on Google. And I also am an entrepreneur and an investor. And so in my company, we create companies. We create startup companies. Often they are B2B SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) businesses and sometimes they’re B2C businesses too. And so we create companies. We invest in companies through our venture capital fund and we work with lots of startup. We kind of specialize in startups, whereas my marketing advertising effectiveness practice specializes in businesses of all sizes and and, yeah, I spend my time kind of bopping around the world, teaching people how to do more effective marketing and more creative marketing and and have a great time doing it, but you can find out all about me at https://www.jameshurman.com/ and, yeah, you can learn a bit more about me there.

Christian Klepp  48:33

Fantastic, fantastic. So once again, James, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

James Hurman  48:39

Thanks, Christian.

Christian Klepp  48:40

All right. Bye, for now.