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Future Demand: Why building your brand among tomorrow's customers is the key to start-up success
A start-up comes to market. They launch an innovative new product. In a totally unique way, they solve a problem for a group of customers just waiting for a solution. Using cost-effective digital marketing, they get their solution in front of those customers. It goes brilliantly. Growth happens exponentially, and at a very low cost. VCs and the media pile in. Techcrunch goes wild. Then something strange happens. New customers become more difficult and expensive to find. The ads stop performing as well. Growth slows. Cost per acquisition begins to rise — and keeps rising. The path to profitability suddenly looks long and treacherous. Eventually, the whole thing peters out. This usually happens around three years from launch. What happened? And how do you prevent it from happening to your start-up? Future Demand explores the realities of how start-ups grow beyond their eager early users, providing evidence and insight into how to build your brand among the much larger group of customers who’ll buy from you in the future.
137 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 8, 2022
18 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 7, 2022
A simple concise and well constructed guide for anyone wanting to win the long term branding game. James provides first hand advice from his long impressive career. He walks you through the what, how and why brands should harvest existing demand while simultaneously investing in future demand, supported with a series of helpful case studies, metrics, and strategic tools. A great read, and one I’ll continue to look back on and refer to.
February 14, 2023
An easy to read practical guide with lots of evidence based rationale. Wee gem of a book.
April 26, 2023
Listened as an audio book - lots of cool case studies and interesting theory
September 11, 2023
Really enjoyed this book.
James summaries a lot of the latest research on brand building into a short book, about 100 pages or so.
His premise is simple - most businesses, specifically startups see lots of growth through capturing existing demand at the start, however as time goes on they see demand decline and the cost of acquisition increase. The solution is to create future demand through brand building.
"Marketing's role can be split out into two clear jobs:
1. Harvest existing demand - capture and convert those customers who are currently in the market.
2. Create future demand - build your brand among customers who aren't yet in the market - make them aware of you and build ane emotional connection so that when they enter the market, you're their first choice"
If you're too heavily focusing on one of these and not the other, you're probably risking your business's ability to sustain profit.
Great book to share with people outside of the marketing function.
James summaries a lot of the latest research on brand building into a short book, about 100 pages or so.
His premise is simple - most businesses, specifically startups see lots of growth through capturing existing demand at the start, however as time goes on they see demand decline and the cost of acquisition increase. The solution is to create future demand through brand building.
"Marketing's role can be split out into two clear jobs:
1. Harvest existing demand - capture and convert those customers who are currently in the market.
2. Create future demand - build your brand among customers who aren't yet in the market - make them aware of you and build ane emotional connection so that when they enter the market, you're their first choice"
If you're too heavily focusing on one of these and not the other, you're probably risking your business's ability to sustain profit.
Great book to share with people outside of the marketing function.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews