Havas Says Desire Drives Growth. STAR Tells You Which Desire.

Havas just published the largest study on brand desire in history. They found that desire, not visibility, predicts sustained growth. But desire is not one thing. It’s four. And the brands that understand the difference will own the next decade.

There is a moment in every industry when the vocabulary shifts. Not because the old words were wrong, but because they stopped being sufficient. Havas just triggered that moment for marketing.

Their “Science of Desire” study, launched at Cannes Lions 2026, surveyed 87,500 people across 2,400 brands in 10 markets. It concluded that desire, the emotional and behavioural force that makes people want a brand rather than merely recognise it, is the strongest predictor of sustained brand growth. Not relevance. Not awareness. Not even preference. Desire.

The study identifies three drivers: attraction, affinity, and attachment. A reinforcing loop that compounds over time. Brands that cultivate desire achieve 2.2 times greater fame, 87% higher pricing power, and 2.4 times more sustained growth than those that don’t.

And here is the number that should stop every marketer mid-scroll: 84% of brands suffer from a “desire deficit.” They occupy a middle ground of consumer indifference, achieving only 61% of their potential.

Eighty-four percent. That’s not a problem. That’s an industry-wide epidemic.

Havas deserves credit for naming it. But naming an epidemic and treating it are different things. And this is where the research opens a door it doesn’t quite walk through.

The Problem with Desire as a Single Construct

Havas describes desire as one force with three phases. Attraction pulls you in. Affinity connects you. Attachment keeps you. It’s an elegant model, and it’s not wrong. But it treats desire as though it operates the same way for every person.

It doesn’t.

Consider two people walking into the same experience, choosing the same brand, buying the same product. One is there because their friends are there. The other is there because they did the research and concluded, logically, that this was the best option. One is powered by relatedness. The other by competence. Both look like “desire” from the outside. Both are driven by completely different psychological architecture on the inside.

If you market to them as though they’re the same, you’ll reach one and alienate the other. If you understand that desire has four distinct engines, each fuelled by a different motivational need, you can reach both without compromising either.

This is what the STAR Operating System was built to do.

Four Engines, Not One

The STAR Framework synthesises seven established psychological theories into four core mindsets, each driven by a primary motivational need identified by Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000). These aren’t personality boxes. They’re operating systems, dynamic patterns of motivation, cognition, and decision-making that shape how people evaluate, choose, and commit.

Here’s how desire actually works, through each lens:

The Socialiser: Desire as Belonging

The Socialiser is driven by relatedness. Their desire engine fires when a brand, experience, or community makes them feel connected, included, and part of something larger than themselves.

Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) explains the mechanism. Humans define themselves through group affiliations, and the Socialiser’s identity is particularly fused with their in-groups. When they desire a brand, they’re not desiring a product. They’re desiring membership. The brand becomes part of how they see themselves, and how they want to be seen by others.

Havas’s “affinity” driver is, for the Socialiser, the entire game. But it’s not generic affinity. It’s relational belonging. The brand that treats it as warm sentiment misses the point. The brand that treats it as tribal membership hits the nerve.

The Thinker: Desire as Mastery

The Thinker is driven by competence. Their desire engine fires when a brand demonstrates intellectual integrity, delivers on its promises, and respects their intelligence.

This is where most desire-focused marketing falls apart. The Thinker doesn’t respond to emotional storytelling. They respond to evidence. They want the data, the proof points, the specification sheet. They desire brands that have earned their respect through rigour, not brands that have manufactured their feelings through creative.

Havas’s “attachment” driver manifests differently for the Thinker. It’s not emotional attachment. It’s epistemic trust. The Thinker becomes attached to brands that consistently prove themselves right. The moment the brand overclaims or underdelivers, the attachment doesn’t fade. It snaps.

The Adventurer: Desire as Freedom

The Adventurer is driven by autonomy. Their desire engine fires when a brand opens possibilities rather than closing them, when it respects their agency rather than prescribing their experience.

Regulatory Focus Theory (Higgins, 1997) explains why. The Adventurer operates with a strong promotion focus, oriented toward growth, novelty, and the pursuit of ideals. They desire brands that feel like launchpads, not programmes. Brands that say “here’s what you can do” rather than “here’s what we’ve designed for you.”

Havas’s “attraction” driver, for the Adventurer, is about liberation. The brand that attracts them is the brand that promises more freedom, not more features. The moment a brand’s marketing feels prescriptive, the Adventurer’s desire doesn’t decrease. It inverts. Desire becomes resistance.

The Realist: Desire as Security

The Realist is driven by security. Their desire engine fires when a brand demonstrates reliability, consistency, and the kind of structural integrity that reduces uncertainty.

This is the most overlooked desire engine in marketing, because it’s the least glamorous. The Realist doesn’t desire excitement. They desire trust. They want to know that the product will work, the service will respond, and the contract will be honoured. Their desire is built through demonstrated reliability over time, not through a single emotional moment.

Havas’s reinforcing loop of attraction, affinity, and attachment operates on a different timescale for the Realist. Attraction is slow and evidence-based. Affinity is earned through consistency. Attachment is deep but conditional. One failure can undo years of accumulated desire, because the Realist’s desire is fundamentally a risk calculation, and a single breach of trust recalibrates the entire equation.

The AI Revelation

The most consequential finding in the Havas study isn’t about desire. It’s about what happens to desire in an AI-mediated environment.

Highly desirable brands are up to four times more likely to be surfaced or cited by AI systems.

Read that again.

Four times. Not marginally more likely. Four times. The AI systems that now mediate consumer discovery, from search assistants to recommendation engines to agentic shopping tools, are not neutral. They are amplifiers of desire. The brands that people genuinely want are the brands that machines recommend. The brands that occupy the middle ground of indifference are invisible.

This has profound implications for the Invisible First Click framework I’ve been developing. By the time a consumer visits your website, the AI assistant has already formed their consideration set. It has made recommendations. It has established credibility hierarchies. It has effectively pre-selected a shortlist. If your brand is absent from that shortlist, you are not losing traffic. You are simply not present at the moment that matters most.

Havas found that 84% of brands suffer from a desire deficit. In an AI-mediated environment, that deficit doesn’t just reduce preference. It eliminates presence. The brands that aren’t desired aren’t just deprioritised. They’re invisible.

And here’s the critical nuance: different STAR types ask AI different questions. The Socialiser asks “which brand has the best community?” The Thinker asks “which brand has the best reviews and evidence?” The Adventurer asks “which brand gives me the most freedom?” The Realist asks “which brand is most reliable?” The AI’s answer is shaped by the brand’s digital presence, and that presence either speaks to a specific desire engine or it speaks to none.

The brands that know which desire they’re serving will train the AI to recommend them to the right people. The brands that try to serve all desires generically will train the AI to recommend them to no one.

The Desire Deficit Is a Segmentation Failure

Havas estimates that brands with a desire deficit achieve only 61% of their potential. That number is generous. In sectors where the product is functionally identical, student accommodation, insurance, utilities, financial services, the deficit is larger, because the desire has to come entirely from the brand experience and communication, not from product differentiation.

Most brands address desire with a single emotional proposition. “We care about you.” “We’re different.” “We’re better.” These propositions assume desire is one thing. It isn’t. The Socialiser desires belonging. The Thinker desires mastery. The Adventurer desires freedom. The Realist desires security. A single proposition can, at best, activate one engine. The other three remain dormant.

The DOTS Communication Framework (Chadderton, 2025) was designed to solve this. DOTS ensures that every piece of high-stakes communication addresses all four desire engines simultaneously:

Data activates the Thinker’s desire engine. Evidence, specifications, proof points, the intellectual substance that earns epistemic trust.

Opportunity activates the Adventurer’s desire engine. Possibility, flexibility, the promise of an experience they define rather than one that’s prescribed.

Togetherness activates the Socialiser’s desire engine. Connection, belonging, the promise of finding their people.

Stabilise activates the Realist’s desire engine. Reliability, consistency, the structural integrity that reduces uncertainty.

Most marketing runs on one or two of these. The brands that run on all four don’t just close the desire deficit. They compound desire across their entire audience, because each type’s desire reinforces the others through social proof. The Socialiser’s belonging makes the Thinker curious. The Thinker’s evidence makes the Realist confident. The Realist’s trust makes the Adventurer willing to explore. The Adventurer’s energy makes the Socialiser excited.

That’s not a funnel. That’s an ecosystem.

What Havas Got Right, and What Comes Next

Havas got the big thing right: desire is the growth engine, and most brands don’t have it. They got the AI amplification right: desirable brands are disproportionately rewarded in automated discovery. They got the deficit right: 84% of brands are leaving growth on the table.

What comes next is the operational question. How do you build desire, not as a single emotional proposition, but as a four-engine system that activates differently for different people?

That’s the question STAR was built to answer. Not because desire is new, but because the ability to decompose it into type-specific engines, and then recompose it through DOTS-aligned communication, is what turns a research insight into a marketing strategy.

The brands that treat desire as one thing will spend the next decade wondering why their emotional campaigns reach some people and repel others. The brands that understand desire has four engines will build the kind of compound growth that Havas measured, but with a precision the study didn’t attempt.

Desire isn’t one force. It’s four. And the brands that figure out which engine they’re firing, for which type, through which channel, will own the next era of marketing.

David Chadderton is the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of three books: The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. He spent his twenties and thirties as a military aviator and instructor, studying how people make decisions when the stakes are highest. He now applies those principles as a Chief Marketing Officer, bringing behavioural science to performance marketing at scale. He writes about human behaviour, AI, and the psychology of decision-making on The Unoptimised Human.