This post was created in partnership with Havas

Key takeaways

  • The most desirable brands are often those that make bold choices when creating affinity with their audiences.
  • Technology has changed how people search for and validate information, making affinity and desire increasingly important.
  • Metrics and frameworks need to evolve to gauge desirability better and surface actionable insights.

Brand growth depends on much more than visibility. Outperforming brands are the ones people truly want and actively choose, trust, talk about, and return to.

During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions group chat co-hosted with Havas, industry leaders explored why desire has emerged as one of the most powerful competitive advantages in modern marketing.

(L-R) Mindscope's Lea Karam, beehiiv's Tyler Denk, SAS' Mirko Mueller-Goolsbey, Havas Creative's Mark Sinnock
(L-R) Mindscope’s Lea Karam, beehiiv’s Tyler Denk, SAS’ Mirko Mueller-Goolsbey, Havas Creative’s Mark Sinnock

From noticed to desired

The conversation began by discussing what differentiates a brand not only from being noticed by consumers, but from actually being desired.

Mark Sinnock, global chief strategy officer at Havas Creative, said it’s the unashamed and unapologetic brands that create the strongest affinity.

“When we’ve started to look at the dimensions of desire, you see that the brands that are really cutting through are able to attract people,” Sinnock noted. “They have this magnetism, so they show up, their body language is bold and confident, and they feel like they’ve got a bit of chutzpah in them.”

Nicole Meier, global director, marketing at Pantone, said her company works with “a lot of brands to help them tap into what their identity is and what their signal is, and how they can communicate that through color and through color psychology, and who they are as a core.”

Speaking from a behavioral science perspective, Lea Karam, founder and CEO at Mindscope, explained that “the brain is actually not a deliberation engine; it’s a prediction engine. So, if you’re able to get it in that natural state of prediction and really build a choice architecture around it, then you’re closer to your communities.”

Effective use of color psychology, Karam added, can help create ritual or habit loops within the prediction system. “Habits, at the moment, are one of the most underused tools in the marketing industry,” she said.

Havas Media Network's Joanna Lawrence
Havas Media Network’s Joanna Lawrence

The influence of affinity and authenticity

Maggie Czarnogorski, head of digital transformation and strategic innovation at ViiV, noted that in the healthcare sector, patients are “getting a lot of information from the internet, so they’re coming into the doctor’s office already kind of knowing what they want and asking for what they want.”

Although healthcare providers continue to serve as what she called gatekeepers, “our new customer is actually LLMs. We need to teach the LLMs to talk about our products in the way that we want them to be talked about, for the consumers to understand and to be gravitating towards those products in the future,” Czarnogorski said.

Joanna Lawrence, global chief strategy officer at Havas Media Network, agreed with Czarnogorski’s insights and said technology is changing the way audiences are “searching for information, how they validate information” and that “brand desire, affinity, attraction actually become more important in the new world of agentic marketing that we’re living in.”

Regarding trust and authenticity, Tyler Denk, co-founder and CEO of beehiiv, said many brands have become effective at creating a sense of transparency through founder-led marketing.

“It’s one layer deeper than just discussing what we’re doing, what product we’re selling. It’s who the people behind the company are who are making the decisions. And that level of transparency, I think, buys a lot of trust in terms of, ‘Is this a brand that I align with, are they building the things that I care about?’” Denk said.

(L-R) ViiV's Maggie Czarnogorski, TIM Brazil's Marcos Lacerda, Pantone's Nicole Meier
(L-R) ViiV’s Maggie Czarnogorski, TIM Brazil’s Marcos Lacerda, Pantone’s Nicole Meier

Measuring brand desirability

The conversation turned to how brands are measuring desirability in the long and short term.

Marcos Lacerda, CMO at TIM Brazil, said he is at the beginning of the process of trying to measure sentiment: “What people are writing about us, what they are saying about us, and when we invite them to go to our live events, how they feel about the space we are in. In the end, it’s all about what the conversation is going to be after what we do.”

Mirko Mueller-Goolsbey, director, brand marketing at SAS, built on Lacerda’s point.

“We’ve just reframed our measurement framework from source and influence pipeline to reach, relationship, and revenue,” Mueller-Goolsbey said. “We don’t know where we’re going to land in a year or two years from now, if we will change from reach, relationship, revenue, but everybody’s going forward.”

Lawrence pointed out that Mueller-Goolsbey’s holistic approach to measurement is important because it gives access to everyone across the marketing ecosystem. Rather than having fragmented experts working on specific metrics, she believed it was more effective for everyone to understand “the overall architecture of brand desire that works in your category and how you can all contribute to that.”

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