The Tracksuit playbook: 5 tips to grow Future Demand in 2025

In a marketing culture obsessed with instant results, it’s easy to neglect the efforts that pay off in the long run but don’t offer that quick ROI fix. Long-term brand building is one of those slow burns.

Its effects may not show up on your performance dashboard tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. In fact, brand building is essential to driving sustainable growth. You have to invest in the shoppers who will bet on your brand in a few weeks, months, or even years — in what brand marketers call Future Demand.

We sat down with the mastermind behind Future Demand, James HurmanOpens in new tab, for some hot takes on what brands can do to nurture future generations of loyalists — and then measure those efforts.

As Co-founder of Tracksuit and Previously UnavailableOpens in new tab, James has helped brands achieve skyrocketing awareness levels with five essential strategies.

1. Know the differences between performance and brand marketing 💡

There are two kinds of marketing: performance and brand. Knowing the difference is critical for deciding where and how to use your advertising dollars. While performance marketing relies on product-focused campaigns to drive immediate sales and nurture existing demand, brand marketing uses emotional campaigns to build future demand.

Although both are essential, James says he’s seen countless brands prioritize performance marketing at the expense of their long-term brand perception. “If you only focus on the quick wins, you’ll eventually hit a growth ceiling,” he warns. “To stay profitable, keep warming up future customers.”

Consider what happened to Nike. After decades of iconic brand building, the household name started pulling back and putting more eggs in the performance marketing basket. As a result, the number of people that prefer Nike over other sportswear brands dipped to just 6%, resulting in a 10% year-on-year revenue drop.

That’s why James says it pays to stay vigilant and never take your eyes off brand. In fact, when done right (and consistently), brand building can deliver some pretty sweet big-picture benefits — like boosting your sales and profit growth. Plus, well-earned brand recognition can even lower customer price sensitivities and empower you to increase your prices.

"All brands must ask themselves: Do you want to be a market leader in three or four years? You can’t keep piling short-term results upon short-term results. You have to measure your brand health and appeal to people who aren’t ready to buy from the category today but will come into the market in future."

2. Don’t wait for consumer behavior to catch up — invest in awareness now 🌱

Catering to customers who aren’t even in the market for your product yet might feel like grasping at smoke — especially when consumer economic sentimentOpens in new tab is more precarious than ever.

But James says this couldn’t be further from the truth. ”You should still be spending 60% of your budget on brand marketing and 40% on performance,” he advises. “Whether they’re buying or not, your future customers are out there.” (If you want a more personalized calculation, try using our Marketing Budget Calculator).

His take? Economic downturns are the ideal time to skew your marketing budget towards awareness campaigns. With fewer people converting, there are even more potential customers in the awareness and consideration buckets.

And there are numbers to back up this takeOpens in new tab: During the 1989 to 1991 recession, Kraft Salad Dressing Brands amped up their brand-building efforts to eventually unlock 70% sales growth. At the same time, McDonald’s dialed down its brand investments, resulting in a 28% sales drop.

Or, if you’re looking for a more recent example, take a look at what happened to The RealReal from 2023 to 2024. They leaned into a cutting-edge, broad-based awareness campaign even as the rest of the luxury resale market saw a 3 to 11% drop in revenue.

Despite the bleak industry outlook, they designed an NYC pop-up campaign to spark conversations around authenticity in the luxury goods industry. The results? A 9% boost in awareness — which led to an 11% increase in year-over-year revenue.

3. Make sure your Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) exceeds your market share 🚀

Building awareness also means taking calculated risks with your marketing budget. Don't assume your budget should perfectly align with your company’s size. Instead, fake it til you make it — i.e., spend more than you think you’re worth.

In practical terms, this means boosting your share of voice (your media spend as a percentage of the total media spend of those in your category). “Most brands’ share of voice will be roughly equivalent to their market shares,” James notes. “But, if you want to grow fast, your share of voice must exceed your market share. This is called ‘excess share of voice’, or ESOV, and it’s been proven in numerous studies that when you have ESOV, you’re likely to grow market share.”

To maintain this competitive edge, James recommends evenly stretching out your spend across the year instead of indulging in spend blitzes here and there. Brand building is slow work, and it benefits from consistent investments in awareness.

Just ask the fast-growing waterproof footwear brand Vessi. To increase top-of-funnel awareness, they knew they’d need to take up more space. So they rolled out an emotional TV campaign across several regions in Canada. As a result, they saw a 5% awareness lift in every demographic they targeted.

"Marketing is a competitive game, and you need to spend enough to compete with others in your category. When I think about the brands who are excelling, I think about the ones who use their ad budgets to bolster their market presence."

4. Diversify into the channels with the broadest reach 📺

When we think of paid advertising, we often think of the highly personalized digital ads that populate our Instagram and TikTok feeds. But don’t discount the classic ad formats like linear TV and Out-of-Home (OOH) campaigns. Digital ads just don’t hit the same as that old-school commercial that’s burned in everyone’s memory.

According to James, the best way to find future customers isn’t only to look for them on highly personalized channels whose algorithm may not even register their interest yet. Instead, you can target prospects through a format that reaches tons of people at once.

James says the tides are turning back towards more traditionally broad advertising, as platforms like Twitch (or in-platform features like YouTube Live) grab the attention of thousands of viewers at once.

While you won’t be able to measure the impact of these campaigns as quickly as your Meta returns, brand health tools can supplement your in-platform analytics and give you actionable insights pretty fast. “Brand marketing is just as measurable as performance marketing,” James says. “And the gold-standard tools will give you a 360-view of your brand health in just 30 days.”

This kind of visibility gave Australian delivery company MILKRUN the confidence to go all-in on an OOH campaign. To keep up with incumbents like Doordash and the Australian supermarket chain Coles, they ran catchy ads everywhere — including public transport stops, buses, and billboards.

Not long after, MILKRUN’s brand health dashboard revealed the campaign had increased awareness by 6% and sparked a 20.23% lift in new customers.

5. Run attention-grabbing, emotionally resonant campaigns 📣

As you dip into newer, flashier channels, you’ll need to adjust your creative to match. James says highly emotional advertising works the best. “Your future customers aren’t going to care about the rational, product-focused ads you might run on Meta,” he says. “Before you can move shoppers down the funnel, you have to earn their trust and create a bond with them.”

The charity Movember — best known for popularizing the November mustache-growing trend — adopted this approach to break free from their public perception as a once-a-year phenomenon. By injecting a little more feeling into their advertising, Movember hoped to call attention to their year-round work for men’s health.

So, in addition to targeting the November campaign’s primary audience (men), they ran a new UK campaign focused on their broader UK market. Aptly named “The Real Face of Men's Health,” this initiative made a moving emotional appeal to anyone affected by men’s health issues — AKA, everyone.

The campaign opened many eyes to Movember’s status as a leading global charity, resulting in a 6% boost in brand perception and a 7% lift in awareness among women.

"In the age of highly targeted advertising, big, emotional campaigns can feel like a lost art. But if you make creative ads that people love — and share — you’ll start to see some of your greatest gains."

Prove the value of your advertising investments with brand health tracking 📊

Real talk: These strategies sound great in theory, but investing in a marketing initiative that doesn’t have an instantly obvious payoff can still be terrifying. “Stakeholders tend to expect ROI ASAP,” James admits. “And if they don’t see it, they might dismiss your hard brand-building work as fluffy.”

That’s exactly why he helped co-found Tracksuit. As a leading brand-tracking software, Tracksuit gives you complete visibility into your brand image. With the platform, you’ll know how many people know about your brand — and exactly what they think and feel about it.

High-growth brands like Movember, MILKRUN, and The RealReal use Tracksuit to:

• Survey thousands of people about their brand perceptions
• Track brand health metrics like awareness, category penetration, and brand associations
• Access results as they come in, thanks to “always on” tracking
• Prove brand-building value to leadership

Let’s put it this way: Tracksuit is a surefire way to build Future Demand and supercharge your growth. Ready to start growing your brand today? Request a demo.

"Tracksuit tells you everything you need to know about your future customers' thoughts and feelings about your brand. You can use these insights to drive growth — and to prove to your CFO, board, or anyone else that what you’re doing is working."