James is the author of three books: Future Demand, The Case for Creativity and The Boy and the Lemon.
Future Demand
How marketing to tomorrow’s customers will break your brand out of the performance trap
Published 2026 by Previously Unavailable Press
Based on the largest advertising effectiveness databases ever assembled, Future Demand reveals a consistent finding across decades and continents: brands that spend roughly half their budgets on brand building and half on performance marketing achieve significantly higher ROI than those that lean heavily into either. This book explains why, and provides the evidence-based playbook for implementing this balance in your business.
Available from June 2026
The Case for Creativity
The link between imaginative marketing and commercial success
Published 2011 by AUT Media; New edition published 2016 by Cannes Lions Publishing
Debate in the advertising and marketing industries has raged for decades: does creativity make advertising more effective? Or is it just the folly of creative people looking to win their next award? The arguments of both advocates and cynics have until recently been based on conjecture and anecdotal evidence. James Hurman’s seminal creative effectiveness book The Case for Creativity, now updated for 2016, brings the debate to a conclusion with three decades of international research into the link between creativity and business results.
Hard copy sold out | Buy the ebook
The Boy and the Lemon
A story about luck…
Published 2015 on Kickstarter
The Boy and the Lemon is a children's story about luck, written by James Hurman and illustrated by Juliet Burton. But more than that, it's a mission to teach children life's most magical lesson: how to be lucky. The story is based on the work of a British psychology professor who studied lucky people and unlucky people, and discovered that lucky people shared a certain attitude and way of approaching life... and if you taught people that attitude, and got them to adopt it, they became more lucky.
The Boy and the Lemon was launched on Kickstarter in 2015 and remains the most backed ever NZ book on Kickstarter.