Eros Advertising: Why Desire Is a Growth Strategy

Eros advertising is the practice of building desire for a brand or product, not just awareness or intent. Where most performance marketing captures demand that already exists, eros-driven advertising creates it, pulling people toward something they didn’t know they wanted until they saw it.

It borrows from the classical concept of eros as longing, appetite, and attraction. In marketing terms, it describes the emotional gravity a brand generates before anyone is in-market. Done well, it is one of the most commercially powerful things advertising can do. Done poorly, it is expensive wallpaper.

What Does Eros Actually Mean in an Advertising Context?

The word eros comes from Greek philosophy, where it described a form of desire that reaches toward something beyond what you currently have. It is not satisfaction. It is aspiration, longing, the pull toward something better or more beautiful or more complete. Plato used it to describe the force that drives humans toward higher ideals. Advertisers, whether they know the etymology or not, have been exploiting it for as long as advertising has existed.

In practice, eros advertising creates a felt sense of want. Not “I need this product because it solves my problem” but “I want to be the kind of person who has this.” It is the difference between a car ad that lists fuel economy and one that makes you feel something when you watch it. The former is informational. The latter is erotic in the classical sense: it generates desire.

This is not about sex in advertising, though that is a common misreading. Eros advertising is about desire in its broadest sense: the desire for status, belonging, beauty, pleasure, transformation, or identity. Luxury brands have understood this for decades. So have the best FMCG advertisers. What has changed is that in an era dominated by performance channels and last-click attribution, the discipline of building desire has been systematically undervalued by a generation of marketers who grew up optimising conversion rates.

If you are thinking about how eros advertising fits into a broader commercial framework, it is worth reading through the thinking on go-to-market and growth strategy here at The Marketing Juice. The principles of desire-building connect directly to how you position a brand, sequence your market entry, and decide where to invest at each stage of growth.

Why Performance Marketing Cannot Do This Job Alone

Earlier in my career I was deeply attached to lower-funnel performance. The numbers were clean, the feedback loops were fast, and the logic felt airtight: spend here, get this back. I spent years managing large paid search and paid social budgets, watching cost-per-acquisition figures like a hawk, and feeling confident we were running tight ships.

What I came to understand, slowly and then all at once, is that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who typed a brand name into a search engine had already decided, or nearly decided. We were not creating that decision. We were just present at the moment it converted. The desire that brought them to that point had been built somewhere else, by something else, often long before our remarketing pixel had any idea they existed.

Think about the clothes shop analogy. Someone who tries on a jacket is dramatically more likely to buy it than someone who walks past the window. But the reason they walked in at all, the reason they picked up that jacket and not another, is almost never explained by the last touchpoint in their path. It is explained by accumulated desire: a brand they had noticed, an aesthetic they had absorbed, a feeling they had been building toward. Performance marketing is the moment they try on the jacket. Eros advertising is everything that made them want to walk through the door.

This is not an argument against performance marketing. It is an argument for understanding what each type of activity actually does. As Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder than it used to points out, the challenge for most teams is not execution, it is the upstream work of creating genuine pull in a saturated market. Performance channels amplify pull. They do not create it.

The Mechanics of Desire: How Eros Advertising Actually Works

Desire in advertising is not mysterious, even if it sometimes feels that way. It is built through a combination of consistent identity, emotional resonance, and scarcity or aspiration. You can break it down into components, even if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Identity projection. The most powerful desire-building advertising shows you a version of yourself you want to be. This is not manipulation. It is the basic human mechanism of aspiration. When someone sees a brand and thinks “that is for someone like me, or someone I want to be,” desire is activated. The brand becomes a vehicle for identity, not just a product category.

Emotional specificity. Generic emotion does not build desire. Vague warmth or generic happiness in an ad is forgettable. What works is specific, textured emotion: the particular pleasure of a quiet morning, the specific pride of finishing something difficult, the exact feeling of belonging in a room where you once felt out of place. The more specific the emotional territory a brand owns, the more magnetic it becomes to the people for whom that emotion is real.

Consistent aesthetic world. Desire is cumulative. A single ad rarely creates it. What creates it is repeated exposure to a coherent brand world: consistent visual language, tone of voice, values, and associations. Each exposure adds to a felt sense of what the brand is and what it means. Over time, that accumulation creates pull. This is why brand consistency is not a stylistic preference but a commercial investment.

Scarcity and aspiration. Desire requires some distance between where you are and where the brand promises to take you. If a brand is too accessible, too ordinary, too available, the desire mechanism weakens. This does not mean every brand needs to be exclusive. But every brand needs to stand for something that not everyone has, whether that is taste, knowledge, quality, membership, or a particular way of seeing the world.

Where Eros Advertising Fits in the Funnel

The conventional funnel model places awareness at the top and conversion at the bottom, with desire somewhere in the middle, usually labelled “consideration.” This framing undersells what eros advertising does. Desire is not just a mid-funnel state. It is the engine that makes the entire funnel work more efficiently.

When a brand has built genuine desire upstream, several things happen downstream. Conversion rates improve because people arrive with more intent. Cost-per-click decreases because branded search volume rises. Retention improves because customers who bought into a desire-led brand have stronger emotional attachment. Word of mouth increases because people talk about brands they feel something about, not brands they simply found convenient.

None of these downstream effects are easily attributed to the upstream advertising that caused them. This is the attribution problem that has led so many marketing organisations to defund brand activity in favour of performance. The performance numbers look better in the short term. But the brand is quietly being depleted, and eventually the performance numbers follow.

I judged the Effie Awards, which are explicitly about marketing effectiveness rather than creative craft. What struck me, reviewing campaigns across categories, was how consistently the strongest commercial performers had done upstream desire-building work. Not always the flashiest work. Not always the most awarded. But work that had built something in the market before the performance engine was turned on. The campaigns that won on effectiveness alone, without any brand foundation, were rare. And they were almost always short-cycle, high-frequency categories where desire has a short shelf life anyway.

For a broader view of how desire-building connects to growth architecture, the thinking on Forrester’s intelligent growth model is worth revisiting. The framework distinguishes between growth that comes from capturing existing demand and growth that comes from expanding the market, which maps directly onto the distinction between performance and eros-led advertising.

The Creative Confidence Problem

Early in my time running agencies, I sat in a brainstorm for a well-known drinks brand. The founder had to leave for a client meeting partway through and handed me the whiteboard pen. I remember the internal reaction clearly: this is going to be difficult. Not because I lacked opinions, but because I understood, for the first time from that side of the room, how much courage it takes to back a creative direction that builds desire rather than just communicates a message.

Desire-led advertising is harder to justify in a brief. You cannot write “this ad will make people want to be the kind of person who drinks this” as a KPI. You cannot A/B test aspiration. You cannot put a number on the felt sense of a brand becoming culturally magnetic. So it gets softened. Committees round off the edges. Legal removes the ambiguity. Procurement pushes for cheaper production. And what comes out the other end is something that communicates clearly but generates no desire whatsoever.

This is the creative confidence problem. It is not a creative department problem. It is a leadership problem. The decision to back work that builds desire, rather than work that ticks boxes, is a commercial decision made by people with P&L accountability. When those people do not understand what desire-led advertising does, or when they are under enough short-term pressure that they cannot afford to find out, the brand suffers.

I have watched this happen across multiple categories and multiple clients over 20 years. The pattern is consistent. A brand builds desire through brave, emotionally specific advertising. It grows. New management arrives with a performance mandate. Brand spend is cut and reallocated to lower-funnel activity. Growth continues for 12 to 18 months, because the brand equity is still doing its work. Then it slows. Then it stalls. By the time the connection is made, the team that made the original decision is long gone.

Eros Advertising and New Audience Growth

One of the clearest commercial arguments for eros advertising is its role in reaching people who are not yet in-market. Performance marketing, almost by definition, can only reach people who are already showing intent signals. Search requires a search. Retargeting requires a prior visit. Even the most sophisticated lookalike audiences are built from people who already know you exist.

Growth, real growth, requires reaching people who have never considered your brand. That means going to where they are, not where your existing customers are. It means building desire before there is any intent to capture. And it means accepting that the return on that investment will not show up in your attribution dashboard for months, possibly years.

Creator-led campaigns are one of the more interesting current expressions of this principle. When a brand works with creators whose audiences overlap with their target but who have not yet been exposed to the brand, the mechanism is fundamentally erotic in the advertising sense: it is building desire in people who had no prior relationship with the brand. Later’s work on go-to-market campaigns with creators captures some of the practical mechanics of how this plays out in real campaigns, particularly the importance of matching creator aesthetic to brand identity rather than just audience size.

The same principle applies to any channel used for new audience development. Out-of-home, broadcast, sponsorship, editorial partnerships: the common thread is that you are building desire in people who were not looking for you. That is a different job from performance marketing, and it requires different creative, different measurement, and different patience.

Measuring Desire Without Destroying It

The measurement question is where most organisations get stuck. Desire is real and it is commercially consequential, but it does not show up cleanly in a dashboard. This leads to one of two failure modes: either you try to measure it with proxies that do not actually capture it, or you declare it unmeasurable and therefore not worth investing in.

Neither is right. The honest position is that desire-led advertising requires honest approximation rather than false precision. There are signals worth tracking: brand search volume over time, brand consideration scores in tracking studies, share of voice relative to share of market, customer acquisition cost trends across cohorts. None of these is a perfect measure of desire. All of them, taken together, give you a reasonable read on whether your brand is building pull or losing it.

What you should not do is run eros advertising through the same measurement framework as performance advertising. Applying last-click or even multi-touch attribution to desire-building work will consistently undervalue it, because the effect operates on a different timescale and through different mechanisms. This is not a reason to abandon measurement. It is a reason to build a measurement architecture that is fit for purpose, one that separates brand health metrics from in-campaign performance metrics and tracks both with appropriate honesty about what each one tells you.

Hotjar’s thinking on growth loops is useful here, not for the specific tools but for the underlying model: growth is not linear, and the feedback loops that sustain it are not always the ones that show up in your primary reporting. Desire is one of those loops. It feeds acquisition, retention, and advocacy in ways that are real but indirect, and measuring it requires building the right feedback architecture rather than forcing it into the wrong one.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that made the difference commercially was understanding which of our business development activities were building desire for the agency as a brand and which were just chasing immediate opportunities. The ones that built desire, thought leadership, editorial presence, the quality of the work we put into the world, had almost no measurable short-term return. But they created the conditions in which the right clients came to us already wanting to work with us. That is eros advertising applied to a services business, and the commercial effect was substantial even if it never appeared in a single attribution report.

What Good Eros Advertising Looks Like in Practice

There is no single template for desire-building advertising. But there are consistent characteristics that separate work that generates genuine pull from work that merely communicates.

It has a point of view. Desire-led advertising takes a position on the world. It says something about what matters, what is beautiful, what is worth wanting. Neutral, committee-approved advertising that tries not to alienate anyone generates no desire in anyone. The brands that build the strongest desire are the ones willing to be specific about who they are for and what they stand for, which implicitly means being willing to be not for everyone.

It respects the audience’s intelligence. Desire is killed by over-explanation. When advertising tells you exactly what to feel and why, it removes the space for genuine emotional response. The best desire-building work creates conditions for a feeling rather than instructing you to have one. It trusts the audience to make the connection.

It is consistent over time. Desire accumulates. A single piece of brilliant advertising can create a moment of pull, but sustained desire requires sustained investment in a coherent brand world. This means resisting the temptation to reinvent the brand every time a new CMO arrives, or every time a campaign does not immediately move the needle in the way a performance campaign would.

It is made with craft. This is not snobbery about production values. It is an observation about what signals quality and care. When a brand invests in the craft of its advertising, that investment is felt by the audience even when they cannot articulate why. Desire is partly a response to quality, and quality shows.

For organisations thinking about how pricing strategy intersects with desire, BCG’s work on go-to-market pricing strategy touches on how perceived value, which is partly a function of desire, affects willingness to pay across different market segments. The connection between brand desire and price premium is one of the clearest commercial returns on eros advertising investment, and it is one that almost never shows up in a performance marketing report.

If you want to go deeper on the strategic frameworks that sit beneath this kind of brand investment, the full collection of thinking on go-to-market and growth strategy covers the commercial architecture that makes desire-led advertising a business decision rather than a creative indulgence.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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