Future Demand: How Marketing to Tomorrow's Customers Will Break Your Brand Out of the Performance Trap

by James Hurman

Your performance marketing is working. So why is growth getting harder and customer acquisition more expensive?
Most marketing teams focus on the small share of customers who are ready to buy today. That captures current demand. It does little to build the much larger pool of people who will buy tomorrow.

Future Demand shows you how to escape the performance trap by making brand building and performance marketing work together.
Drawing on two decades of marketing science, behavioural research and real world case studies, marketing effectiveness researcher and entrepreneur James Hurman explains how demand before customers enter the marketImprove performance marketing efficiency through stronger brand preferenceRecognise metrics that look healthy while genuine growth stallsUse creativity and emotion to create measurable commercial advantageMeasure marketing in a way that reflects how customers actually buyBalance short term conversion with sustainable long term growthThis is not brand versus performance.
It is a practical framework for integrating both so your marketing works harder today while creating the customers your business will depend on tomorrow.

Written for CMOs, founders, marketing leaders, agency teams and finance leaders, Future Demand gives you a clearer way to allocate marketing investment, defend brand building, improve advertising effectiveness and build profitable growth that lasts.

299 pages, Paperback

Published July 16, 2026

Reviews

[Rasmus Stoltzenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

As far as marketing books for marketing and advertising professionals go, this is the one to read. Got a lot going for it, first of which is the complete lack of fluff that contemporary business books are full of. Concise, well-researched and with a clear train of thought throughout. This pulls together research from the past 5 or even 20 years, and makes the case for why it's not a branding vs performance game, but a game of winning by creating future demand, that can then be converted by then-today's performance marketing into sales. With clear, backed-by-proof data on how share-of-voice, spend, division between branding&performance, market share, ROI, etc, etc, etc.

Highly recommended to anyone involved with marketing, not only the people working in marketing. Personal pick for one of the few truly brilliant and readily applicable business books, alongside Good Strategy / Bad Strategy and a really small handful of others.

[Michael Giordano · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’m ready for my MBA