You Can't Create Desire, You Can Only Call It Out: A Research Playbook

How many of your last ten ads started with a desire you'd actually found in the wild, rather than a feature you decided was clever in a meeting?

Be honest. Most of them started with the product. You built the thing, you're proud of it, so the ad opens with what it does. Forty grams of protein. Hand-poured in small batches. Clinically dosed.

And then people swipe past, because nobody woke up this morning wanting your product. They woke up wanting something else entirely, and your job is to figure out what that is and connect the two.

Here's the bit that took me too long to learn: you can't create desire. It's already out there. People want to feel confident, to look good, to stop being in pain, to belong. You don't manufacture that wanting. You find it, you call it out, and you show them your product is the way across. Get that right and the work gets easy, like putting a raft in fast water and letting the current carry it. Get it wrong and you're paddling uphill no matter how slick the creative is.

So the real skill isn't writing. It's research. Here's the flow I use.

The whole game is finding what people already want

Before the sources, one idea that has to land, or none of this works.

A desire is the thing your customer wants for themselves: to feel fit, to be admired, to stop stressing about money. Your product is just the mechanism, the way they get there. People don't buy the mechanism. They buy who they become once they have it.

So the entire research job is this: find the strongest desires sitting in your market already, then work out which ones your product is a believable answer to. Everything below is just where I go looking.

I pull from three sources. Your own brand, your competitors, and the wider online content your customer consumes. Each one tells you something the other two can't.

Source one: your own brand

Start with what you already have, because it's the cheapest and it's sitting right there.

Read your reviews, the good and the bad. Read the comments under your ads, your support inbox, your tagged posts, your DMs. You're hunting for the language people actually use when they describe what they wanted and what they got.

The thing to look for isn't "I like the product". That tells you nothing. You want the why underneath it. Someone writing "I finally feel comfortable taking my shirt off at the beach" has just handed you a desire and the exact words to call it out. Someone writing "as a side sleeper I'd given up finding a pillow that works" has handed you a problem framed in their own voice.

Your best hooks are often hiding in a three-star review where a customer explains, in plain language, the itch your product scratched. Take the language verbatim. They'll always say it better than you would.

Source two: your competitors

Next, go look at who else is fighting for the same customer. Two flavours of competitor matter here.

The obvious one is anyone selling a similar product. The less obvious one, and often the more useful, is anyone solving the same desire with a completely different product. A magnesium supplement and a weighted blanket aren't the same product, but if they're both promising better sleep, they're after the same wanting.

What I do with competitors:

• Read their reviews, good and bad. Their one-star reviews are a gift. They tell you exactly where the current solution is letting people down, which is the gap your angle can walk into.
• Look at the ads they've been running for a while. If something has been live for months, it's almost certainly working, and the desire it's calling out is one worth paying attention to.
• Note the desire, not just the creative. The format will go stale. The desire underneath it usually won't.

You're not copying their ad. You're reading the market through them, and clocking which wants are hot enough that other people are spending real money to chase them.

Source three: the wider online world

The third source is everything your customer reads, watches, and searches when they're not thinking about you at all.

Pretend you're the customer for a minute. If the desire is "lose weight before a holiday", go and search exactly that on YouTube, on TikTok, on Reddit, on Google. Look at the titles that pull you in. Look at the first three seconds of the videos that stop your scroll. Look at the threads where people describe the problem in their own words, unfiltered, with nobody selling to them.

Reddit has become my favourite for this, because it's people talking honestly to each other rather than performing. You see the real fears and the real wants, stated plainly.

This source is where you also get a feel for how crowded a desire already is. If everyone is shouting the same promise, you'll need a sharper angle or a different mechanism to be heard. If barely anyone is naming a particular want, you might have found something with room to run.

Turning a desire into a hook

Once you've got a desire, the ad almost writes itself, because the hook is just the desire said out loud.

A hook has two parts that have to agree with each other. The words on the screen, and the visual the eye lands on in that first second. Both should resemble what the person wants. If the desire is more energy, the line calls out the energy and the visual shows someone with it, not a shot of the bottle.

Here's a made-up example to show how a found desire beats an invented one. Imagine a brand selling a simple at-home activity kit, and the team's instinct is to run "premium materials, beautifully designed". Quiet results. Then someone reads the comments and spots the same phrase over and over: women asking what to actually do on a girls' night that isn't just drinks again. That's a desire, stated by the customer, in the customer's words. Rebuild the hook around it, "for my girlfriends who need a proper girls' night", and suddenly you're calling out a real want instead of describing a product. In an illustrative case like that, a single angle built off one overheard line can end up carrying tens of thousands of dollars of spend on its own, not because the creative was clever, but because the desire underneath it was real and the product was a believable answer to it.

That's the whole move. You didn't create the wanting. You found it sitting in a comment and pointed your product at it.

Test the desire before you fuss over the format

This is the part most people get backwards, so I'll be blunt about it.

When an ad underperforms, the reflex is to blame the format. Wrong edit, wrong length, wrong hook style, should've been a static, should've been UGC. So people rebuild the same idea in a new wrapper and wonder why it still doesn't move.

Often the format was fine. The desire was wrong. You were calling out a want your product doesn't credibly satisfy, or a want too small to scale into, and no amount of editing fixes that.

So test the desire first. Take three or four genuinely different desires your product could plausibly answer, build a simple ad for each, and let them run against each other. You're not polishing yet. You're asking one question: which wanting does the market respond to? Once one desire clearly pulls ahead, then you go deep on it, iterating formats and visuals and angles underneath the winner.

Get this order right and you stop wasting weeks making a beautiful ad for a desire nobody had.

It also reframes what "a good ad" even means. A good ad isn't the one that looks best to you. It's the one built on a real desire that's actually working in the account. Those are often not the same ad, which is humbling, and worth sitting with.

So before you script your next batch, the question I'd ask yourself is this: do you actually know the top three things your customers want, in their own words? Or have you been guessing, and calling it strategy?