Craft as the Engine of Desire: The Role of Production Excellence in Driving Brand Growth
At Cannes Lions this year, Havas launched The Science of Desire, a global study exploring a critical and simple question: what makes people genuinely want a brand? The study argues that sustainable growth is driven not merely by awareness, but by desire, which is built through the combination of attraction, affinity and attachment. Attraction creates the initial pull. Affinity establishes emotional relevance. Attachment transforms preference into enduring behaviour.
For marketers, the framework offers a useful way of understanding how stronger relationships between brands and people are formed. In parallel, it also raises a question. If attraction, affinity and attachment are the key forces driving desire, what is the engine bringing them into existence?
For POP, the answer lies in craft.
Why craft empowers growth through desire
In many conversations across the industry, craft is often discussed as a finishing touch: the final stage that enhances an idea before it reaches market. We see it differently. Craft is not what happens after strategy; it is the mechanism through which strategy becomes tangible. It is what transforms messaging into emotion and creative thinking into something people genuinely value.
This distinction feels important at a time when content production is undergoing fundamental change. The widespread adoption of AI has dramatically increased the industry’s ability to create, adapt, and distribute content at scale. As a result, production capacity is no longer the constraint it once was; the ability to create better work that people genuinely care about is.
The challenge facing brands today is not a lack of content. Audiences are exposed to more content than at any previous point in history, much of it technically competent and increasingly difficult to distinguish. In this environment, visibility becomes easier to achieve while genuine preference becomes harder to earn.
This is where the findings of The Science of Desire become particularly relevant. Attraction, affinity and attachment are all, in different ways, responses to quality. They are created when people encounter experiences that feel distinctive, coherent, and meaningful. They emerge when a brand demonstrates a level of care that audiences can recognize, consciously or not.
“Growth comes from creating experiences people actively want to engage with, not simply from increasing visibility“, explains Stefane Rosa, CEO US at POP. Attraction begins with a compelling idea, while affinity and attachment are established through repeated interactions that consistently deliver value. Craft is what gives those interactions their emotional weight. “It is what enables a brand to move from being noticed to being remembered and ultimately chosen“, she reflects.
Craft in the age of infinite content
The importance of craft becomes even more apparent when viewed through the lens of technology. Much of the current conversation surrounding AI focuses on efficiency, speed and scale. These benefits are real and transformative, but efficiency alone has never been a driver of desire: consumers do not develop stronger connections with brands because content was produced faster. They develop stronger connections because the experience feels relevant, useful, engaging, or memorable.
In that sense, AI changes the economics of production, but it does not change the fundamentals of human behaviour. The factors that make people care remain remarkably consistent. Distinctive ideas and emotional resonance still matter. Storytelling, taste and creativity still matter. If anything, their importance increases as content becomes more abundant. “For us, that’s the opportunity: combining human creativity, technology and executional excellence to create experiences that don’t just reach people but make them care“, says Stefane.
Eugénie Valletoux, Head of Communication & Business Growth at Vermeer.ai – Havas’ proprietary Gen-AI solution developed by POP – describes craft as an expression of attention. “Polishing details, fine-tuning until you’re totally satisfied even if it takes dozens of rounds of rework – all that attention you put into creating good work communicates about how much you care“, she says.
For her, all this process signals intention and shows someone has taken the time to make an experience feel right rather than merely complete. “A terrific idea that is poorly executed won’t make people fall in love“.
That level of attention is often what separates content that performs from content that builds lasting brand equity. While audiences may not recognize every creative decision behind a successful piece of work, they invariably recognize the effect. And the truth is that the feeling of quality is rarely the result of a single element. It is created through the consistent application of judgment across hundreds of decisions, large and small.
Scaling craft, not content
This has significant implications for how organizations think about scale. Historically, there has been an assumption that quality and scale exist in tension with one another; that increasing one inevitably compromises the other. Yet brands today require both. They need to engage audiences across more channels, markets and formats than ever before while maintaining consistency and relevance throughout the entire customer journey.
According to Paul Ward, Global President & CEO UK at POP, the objective should not be to use technology to produce more content simply because it can. “We spend a lot of time talking about craft. It’s our greatest single quest to not just deliver at scale but deliver craft at scale. We don’t want to play any part in flooding the world with more, meaningless content at great volumes” – he reinforces. “We prefer to challenge our clients to make less, but better, harder working content“.
This is why POP’s approach is built on the belief that AI should enhance craft, and human creativity remains the starting point. In the end, creative judgment determines what is worth making and why it matters. “Growth comes from ensuring that every interaction reinforces the same standard of quality and empowers emotional connection“, Paul adds.
Of course, technology enables work to travel further, adapt more intelligently, and reach audiences with greater efficiency. Through modular content systems and the orchestration capabilities of Vermeer.ai, POP can create frameworks that allow ideas to evolve across channels and audiences without losing the qualities that made them effective in the first place. The goal is to protect creativity while enabling it to scale.
A craft-led future
The Science of Desire proves that the sources of competitive advantage are shifting. As production becomes increasingly automated and content creation becomes increasingly accessible, value moves from the ability to produce towards the ability to create meaning. Judgment, originality, consistency and care have become important qualities – exactly the qualities that define craft.
If desire is the force that drives growth, craft is the force that creates desire. Attraction, affinity and attachment do not emerge in isolation; they are built through thousands of deliberate decisions that shape how a brand is experienced over time.
The brands that succeed in the years ahead will be those that combine technology with an unwavering commitment to creative excellence. And in a world increasingly defined by abundance, craft becomes the ultimate catalyst of success in this ecosystem.
“The Science of Desire” research is available for free download here.
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