Building businesses people remember in the age of AI

James Hurman, co-founder of Tracksuit and one of advertising's most cited effectiveness researchers, makes the case that brand is the asset a company can still compound.

Coca-Cola has never sold a chilli Coke. If it launched one tomorrow, it would outsell a startup that spent two years perfecting the same drink, on the same shelf, at the same price. Nothing separates them except the name on the can. That name, how it’s presented, the font used, and the colours are an asset AI cannot copy into anyone else's product.

James Hurman has spent his career measuring what makes advertising work, with more than 50 effectiveness awards and four books behind him. On The Airwallex Podcast, he told Lowrie Gladwell, Country Lead for Airwallex New Zealand, that the distance from "an idea in your head to being an actual living, breathing thing in the world has just collapsed."

That collapse is wonderful news for anyone with an idea, but less good for any company whose head start was being hard to copy. AI hands every company in your category the same speed. James argues that what separates those who will survive from those who won't will be brand.

Recognition carries growth past the early adopters

Brand takes a while to become really relevant, because your first customers will take a punt on a company nobody has heard of, as long as your product solves their problem. Early adopters are the reason a good product can tear into a new market with nothing behind it.

But the mainstream wants to have heard of you before it parts with money. James puts the moment companies stumble right there. The first stretch in a market flatters you, the next one punishes you, because the mainstream wants to recognise the name on the invoice before it signs.

The same test applies in every market you enter. The problem has to exist there, and your solution has to fit it.

Brand makes you distinctive, so you stop looking like everyone else on the shortlist. It makes you familiar. It draws people towards you, warms them to you. Moving into new markets, he advises changing the language where the market speaks another one, and the manner of your arrival where the culture asks for it. Leave the rest alone, because brands "can travel and should travel and always show up looking like themselves."

81% of B2B deals go to a vendor the buying team already knew

Business buyers are often considered to be immune to all of this, but not so. The B2B Institute at LinkedIn studied significant purchases across many sectors and organisations. James puts what they found at “81% of the time, the vendor that won the deal was known to everyone in the buying team inside the organisation before they went into that RFP process."

Your own last significant purchase went through a group, and the technical expert was one voice in it. The rest of the room had heard of the winner long before the process started. Familiar reads as safe, and safe is what a group buys when nobody wants to own the wrong decision. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" survives on that logic, because committees behave this way and committees approve the spend.

Familiarity bias does half of that work. A name you have seen on a conference badge, in a podcast feed, or in three posts from someone whose judgement you rate gets pulled towards the shortlist, and you will struggle to say why. The affect heuristic does the rest. Feel warm about one vendor and neutral about the other, and you will decide the warm one's product is better on a rational, functional basis, then go looking for the specs that prove it. Neither bias switches off even for the most technical buyer in the room.

Warm customers buy at full price

Plenty of founders still believe what Jeff Bezos said in 1999, that advertising is the price a company pays for making an unremarkable product. Google and Facebook did grow without it, and so did Amazon's platform. All three were also free to use, and all three were generational inventions. Charge money for your product, compete against near neighbours, and those examples stop being any guide at all.

The money follows two paths, because strong brands grow revenue faster and earn more on every sale. Customers who feel warm about you buy at full price, pay more than your competitor charges, and stay when you put your prices up. Margin like that compounds into profitability and cushions the business when a market turns. Hurman's rough estimate on air puts the strongest brands 20 to 50% ahead of the S&P 500.

Built far enough, the advantage becomes a moat, which is the whole reason that can of chilli Coke would sell. Apple trades on the same privilege. Brand then belongs with the moats investors weigh, such as proprietary data, distribution, and vertical depth. James refuses to call a younger company's brand a moat, because a new company's brand is still an idea the founders are making true.

Brand can now clear a hurdle rate

Even so, finance has good reason to cut the brand line. Every dollar a company spends has to earn back more than the cost of raising it. Performance marketing arrives with a cost per-acquisition and a payback window. Brand marketing has arrived with a hunch. James calls it "very natural for CFOs to tend towards what can be counted, because they're accountants," and he treats that as fair enough rather than an obstruction.

Econometric modelling has since given that hunch a figure. Studies across many companies, categories, and sizes put advertising's return at about $4 of revenue for every $1 invested over two years, and any company can run the same modelling on its own numbers.

Some of that spending behaves like OpEx, paid for now and returned now. The rest behaves like CapEx, landing after the financial year closes. No accounting standard lets a company book brand marketing that way, and nothing stops a board planning around it.

Companies that balance "about half and half, maybe a little bit more on brand, a little bit less on performance" post the best overall marketing ROI. Four studies, one from 1992, one from 2013, and two from 2025, land in the same place. Marketing swung from over-investing in brand a generation ago to over-investing in performance today, and

Hurman's case is that the data now makes the correction hard to argue with.

A business entering Singapore, San Francisco, or Sydney can have the money side sorted in an afternoon, with local accounts, local payment methods, and funds moving on local rails. Getting chosen there takes longer, because the buyer has to have heard of you before anyone writes the shortlist.

The product gets you in the door. The brand decides whether anyone remembers your name when the door opens again.