When Desire Drives Value Beyond Habitual Purchase.
Emotional equity sustains growth when function reaches parity.
From Habit To Desire
Consumer behavior is split between two modes: habitual purchase and desire-driven choice. Habit sustains volume but is shallow; it is guided by convenience, availability, or price. A shopper picks up the same detergent, the same phone plan, or the same snack without reflection.
Desire works differently. Desire reshapes demand curves, pulling people toward a product even when cheaper or functionally identical alternatives exist. Brands anchored in desire are not only purchased, they are sought out, discussed, and defended.
This distinction explains why some names command premiums and resilience, while others remain trapped in commodity cycles.
How Desire Creates Value
Ferrari’s trajectory shows how emotional equity scales. It has fewer cars on the road than mass producers, yet its brand value grows faster. What consumers are buying is not transportation but status, scarcity, and cultural cachet. That meaning travels into fashion, motorsport, and lifestyle collaborations, creating value well beyond the car itself.
Hermès applies similar mechanics with the Birkin bag. The object is structurally a handbag, but scarcity, craftsmanship, and cultural symbolism transform it into a global icon. The waiting lists and secondary market prices reveal how far desire can stretch the value of a functional good.
This dynamic extends into categories long assumed immune to emotion. Who Gives A Crap reimagined toilet paper, an archetypal commodity, into a brand people talk about and willingly pay a premium for. Humor, design, and social impact turned necessity into statement. The insight is that emotional coding can recast any product, even the most mundane, as an object of preference.
Why Desire Outperforms Function
Functional advantages decay. Technology diffuses, processes are replicated, and price competition flattens margins. Desire resists erosion because it is not built on function but on meaning. Emotional equity creates irrational preference, the willingness to pay more or to wait longer when rational alternatives are available. That irrationality is what protects premium pricing and longevity. Ferrari and Hermès are resilient not because they make something no one else can, but because no one else can substitute the symbolic role they occupy.
The financial impact is direct. Brands with high desire scores consistently outperform market indices. Their shareholder returns reflect the compounding effect of loyalty, premium pricing, and cultural relevance. Desire is not indulgence; it is measurable capital.
Implications For MENA Challengers
In the Middle East and North Africa, many categories are still defined by function and price competition. Telecom operators fight on tariffs, retailers compete on discounts, and logistics firms race on speed. This leaves challengers exposed to commoditization. The opportunity is to shift from utility to identity. Telecoms can frame themselves as enablers of national ambition and digital lifestyles. Retailers can tie their platforms to cultural pride and regional creativity. Mobility firms can anchor services in lifestyle positioning rather than transactional convenience. These moves recode categories with desire and build resilience against price wars.
Regional precedent exists. Telecom leaders like stc and e& have begun moving beyond function by aligning themselves with national transformation programs and digital ecosystems. But the field remains wide open for consumer brands in food, fashion, and fintech to use desire as a growth lever.
Those that succeed will escape parity and establish cultural relevance that endures.
Bottom Line
Desire is the strongest form of brand equity because it cannot be copied at scale.
It transforms the ordinary into the iconic, protects pricing power in markets defined by parity, and extends brand relevance across decades where habitual purchases fade into anonymity.
