[Podcast] How To Tap Into Primal Human Desires with Nathan Hendricks

Nathan Hendricks believes there is no excuse for a lousy brand. As chief creative officer at LPK, he challenges the organization’s creative teams to uphold the vision that every brand should make a powerful and positive difference for the people it serves. A candid cultural commentator, he’s never afraid to tell it like it is.

In this episode, we explore primal human desires and how we can use them to create stronger brands.

Nathan holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from The Ohio State University, where he majored in visual communications and cultivated an affection for industrial beer.

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LPK is a brand, innovation and customer experience consultancy, helping organizations build enduring brands that thrive in the emergent culture. Merging trends, insights, strategy and creativity, we create the now, near and next for B2Bs and B2Cs, startups and Fortune 50s. We’ve done it since 1983 across our network of offices worldwide. Find us in Cincinnati, London and Geneva—and on lpk.com.

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Show Notes

• LPK’s  Website
• LPK’s Desires Info

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Well, hello folks, and welcome to JUST Branding. Today, we have the wonderful Nathan Hendricks with us. He is the Chief Creative Officer at the Global Agency Lpk.

And apparently, and I quote from his LinkedIn profile, he is the intangible force behind the creativity and imagination of the people at Lpk. So it’s an absolute honor to have you with us, Nathan, today. The force.

Yeah, the force.

Do my own PR.

Yeah, definitely. They did the PR really well. We’re going to be talking about customer desires because Nathan has done some amazing work in this space to really kind of segment and simplify how we should think about or how he as a strategist thinks about the customer’s desires, essential for building brands.

We’re going to dig into that in a minute. So Jacob and I are super excited to have you on the show. Welcome, Nathan.

Thank you, guys. Happy to be here. Yeah.

Well, so, okay. So perhaps, first of all, we could kind of kick off with how we always like to kick off, which is to kind of like frame the conversation for our audience, for ourselves, and for anyone else who happens to be listening. First of all, my first question then is, is what are customer desires?

And really, how do they relate to building brands?

Yeah, well, I guess, number one, I’m not a strategist, I’m a designer. So I just want to make that perfectly clear from the beginning. And I kind of discovered desires kind of by accident, actually.

And the reason I discovered them is because I was struggling with the kind of information that I was getting out of focus groups, and just the kind of lack of either truthfulness or literally the ability for people to kind of talk truthfully about, you know, why they were buying things, why they were in certain categories. And so desires really are part of a framework that was developed by Professor Stephen Rees. And this framework is one that I came across probably about 10 years ago by name.

But he describes and defines desires as highly ingrained universal needs, wants or cravings. And when I saw that language, that word universal was really important to me just because we work on a number of different brands at Lpk. Many of them are global brands, and I think anybody who works on a global brand knows what a trick that is to make that brand work well in North America as well as it does in South America or Shanghai or wherever.

So the universality of desires is really important. The way that Stephen Reese thinks about desires is or thought about them, he has since passed away, is they are kind of evolutionary adaptations that keep you healthy, happy, socially effective. And they are the kind of core motivation for your decision making and indeed your behavior.

And so as a designer, I just thought that is really what I want, because I want to essentially give a gift to the people that I’m designing for, something that they truly want. And I think often we were designing with such lousy precision that the work we do goes out into the world and doesn’t satisfy anyone. So ultimately, I found desires as a way to understand on a deeper level why people are standing at a shelf buying different products or services.

What I’ve also found is that it connects what a brand stands for with its offer and ultimately how it shows up in the world. And then I guess the third thing that I would say is that if you think about the different types of people who are in charge of fielding a brand into the world. So you’ve got marketers, you’ve got researchers, you’ve got R&D people, you’ve got designers, you’ve got salespeople.

And what I’ve found is that often these are different types of people and they’ve got different ways of thinking about the world and they’ve got different ways of thinking about a brand. And so sometimes it’s difficult to get everybody on the same page. And so when you can alight upon a specific desire, what I found is it aligns all the efforts of those people and an effort to feel the brand.

And then I guess the last thing I would say is, you know, sometimes we’re looking for this deep emotional insight, some insight that no one has ever discovered before that can create a competitive advantage for your brand. Sometimes those just do not exist. Sometimes an insight is as simple as, I want to clean clothes.

And it’s not much deeper than that, and it’s hard to get deeper than that. So what we found is that desires can help amplify what we would call mundane insights. So we use them in our design practice, we use them in our strategy practice to help position brands, so people know exactly why they’re feeling a brand in a certain category.

I don’t know where to go from there, there’s a lot to dive into there. I guess, often we like hearing about examples of how this actually applied in the real world and how to actually use that for a brand. So is there a brand that comes to mind when you talk about, well, let’s put it this way, is there something that you’ve uncovered, like a mundane insight that you’ve uncovered and then put in to practice, like, what did that look like?

So a mundane insight. So we work with a very famous golf company. A Kushnet is the name of the company.

They have Titleist as a brand, number one brand in golf, very famous. They also have a kind of a value ball. And they’ve done a lot of consumer work to try to understand, what is the deep insight around golf for this value ball customer?

And I really just boil it down. The insight they came out with was that golf’s fun. And that’s a pretty mundane insight.

Of course golf’s fun, like, why would you do it? But to design against that, like, do you make fun packaging for a golf ball? Like, I don’t know.

So we kind of looked at the verbatims that came out of the research and found that the reason they landed on this word fun is because there are some golfers that go out and want to win, but there are other golfers that are just going out just for the fun of it, but the social contact of it, just going out with their buddies and whacking the ball around. And these guys are losing balls right and left. But it is about getting back to the clubhouse and bragging about a shot that someone was lucky enough to hit or reducing the self-esteem of their colleagues in the clubhouse.

But when you kind of dig into it, we found that there was a couple of different insights that desires could help us unearth. One was, even though you’re going out there to have fun and camaraderie with your friends, it does suck to suck. At some point, the fun leaks out of the game if you are constantly coming in last or if you’re constantly demonstrating your lack of abilities.

So in the desires model, there is a desire of vengeance. And vengeance can be simply about getting back at someone, but it’s also about winning. And brands that are about vengeance typically are about performance because you want the performance to help you win, right?

So even though a golf is about fun, it does suck to suck. And counter-intuitively, vengeance, which is kind of a forward-facing, kind of rage-filled desire, seemed counter-intuitive there, but it made sense relative to the verbatims. The other desire that was kind of popping for us was idealism.

Sorry to interrupt, I’m really curious on how you actually chose these, or how did you actually get to the point of choosing those? I know there’s 16 desires, or core desires. How did you actually choose these ones?

Yep. So it’s funny because when I first found this model, I thought we’re gonna have to hire psychologists to be able to use with us. But what I found is part of his model, he’s got a desire, and then there’s an intrinsic feeling when you satisfy that desire.

And so for instance, the desire for status is the desire to feel self-important or better than everyone else. So when I satisfy my desire for status or prestige, I just feel better than you. And even though no one would ever say that in the focus group, I want to feel better than everybody else.

I want to feel superior. It’s interesting to see, it’s interesting that you can actually see that behavior starting to show in focus groups. You can see it showing up in the verbatim.

So people can talk about the feelings they want to have, have a difficult time talking about the desires that underpin them. So I’m trying to think of another example for you. So another thing about golf is golf is about mastery, right?

And so for say a titleist golfer, they want to master the game of golf. So they want to get better every time they play, they’re keeping track of their scores, their handicaps, they are meticulous about that. Getting better mastery is about power.

And so when you start to see the behavior and the things that people want from their game, you can start to point to the desire that underpins that pleasure. So…

Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah. So just to recap, so you’re uncovering, like you talk to these people and you’re getting the, I guess, the surface level thoughts.

And if you reverse engineer it, you can kind of dig deeper and understand what the desire is and then use that information to help create a brand that’s a little bit more emotionally connected. Is that…

Yeah, so I guess maybe one step back that is a little bit broader than just desires. So at Lpk, we define a brand as the promise of the next experience. And we think of the things that connect people to brands relative to that experience as connecting at the head, the heart and the gut.

And so the head is obviously the rational benefits, the heart, the emotional benefits, the kind of… The things that you have in common with the brand. The gut part is really about the desires.

And back to focus groups, I mean, I think what we found is people can express the rational, the head part, and the emotional part in a focus group. And you can get lots of information there. But it’s the gut part that they have a challenge expressing.

And so when you hear the head and the heart, it often will point to the desire that underpins the pleasure.

So that’s the mysterious area. The gut has the secret, the secret desire that people don’t want to talk about. I know Matt’s probably dying with 100 questions by now.

Well, I just wanted to say, I’m still in with the story of the golf company. Yeah, I mean, I was just like, yeah, like I was thinking about our relationship, Jacob, how like, you know, like Nathan mentioned that people who play golf are always trying to find ways to reduce their colleague’s self-esteem. And I thought, yeah, that kind of fits with Jacob.

And then he went, yeah, what’s really driving them is vengeance. And I was thinking, yeah, yeah, this is good.

This is good.

So I’m only kidding. So Nathan, so you discovered that and you said you were about to say you found something else. What was the other driver that you found with that mundane example, which is turning out to be riveting?

Yeah. So if you think about the duffer or just the kind of high handicap golfer, they are not only losing lots of balls, but they are golfing more than the high end golfer is. And what we found is that these golfers are literally keeping the game of golf alive and they love it, even though they suck at it.

And so there’s an ideal around golf and there’s a reverence that people have around golf, even though they may not be great at it. And so because these people are kind of voluminous in the size of the cohort, we thought, maybe this brand could be about the ideal of golf. And if you’re really into golf, you would think that the world would be a sad place without it.

So we thought this brand could stand for golf. And so the 99% of golfers who don’t get the accolades are the people that are keeping this sport alive. So what this allowed us to do was to kind of go, we’re going to design against vengeance and we’re going to design against idealism.

And this is going to allow us to have something that is strategically born out of human experience and it will drive our designs to two very distinctive places. And so it allowed us to form a hypothesis out of a mundane insight, born and rooted in the human experience. And what we found was voided men, especially respond to vengeance.

And so we launched a package for this brand. And one of those brands that does not have a kind of marketing support over and above the package, so we knew that this design was responsible for the success or failure of the brand moving forward. And for six months, 30% uptake on sales.

So just this idea that you could design against a desire, and as designers, kind of creating the design language for that designer and designing with much more precision in a way that connects with the end user was really gratifying.

Love it. I thought you said you weren’t a strategist, Nathan, but you seriously use strategy in that analogy. And rightly so, because how can you do a good job as a designer, I always say, without really having a sort of a step back from everything and really questioning everything and understanding the customer at the heart of the experience you’re trying to put forward.

And really then you sort of step into the realms of strategy as soon as you start thinking like that.

Of course.

Yeah, Nathan, I was going to ask you about the next step after that. I know you talked briefly about the design, but what was actually, what did you actually design and what did that look like and how did it actually fit those desires that you speak about?

So one of the things that we do is once we understand the desire and we understand what the intrinsic pleasure of satisfying that desire is, we extract what we call consumer truths. And what were the clues that told us that this was the desire? So we might come up with three or four different consumer truths.

It might be, I want to hit farther, faster. It might be that I want to be more consistent. It might be that I want to dial in my consistency.

It might be that I want to dial up my score. And it might be that I simply want to win. And we then take those consumer truths.

And for each one of those, we think, like, for me to understand that you’re about dialing in consistency, what must I see, hear, feel, taste, smell, to understand that this brand is about that? And the reason we use these multisensorial words is because those are essentially design words. You know, like, if you came to me and said, make it look authentic, like, I’m not going to design, I can’t design against authentic, I’m not going to design against fun either, really.

But if you can extract the consumer truths or the attributes of that and translate that into a multisensorial language, designers know what to do with that. And you get a rich design language that can then be translated into design tools that can create a system that goes into packaging and other kinds of marketing. So that’s essentially what we do.

When we understand the desire, the pleasure, we essentially translate those into what we call codes.

Nice.

Sounds like you have a lot of lingo in the agency. Agency, age per process.

What I love about that is it’s the depth of thought fueled by the data from the insights and the focus groups that you’ve been referring to. And so, you touched on something at the start, which was this concept of being universal. And that is the realm of psychology, right?

Weirdly, I think of the work of Carl Jung, and I think of the work of Sigmund Freud and people like that, and how the work of those psychologists really unearthed this idea that we’re wired as humans a certain way. And particularly Carl Jung, he had a theory, I don’t know if you know it, called the collective unconscious, which is like, we’re all kind of, we all as human beings, almost like human nature, have a particular way of responding to certain things, to certain kind of archetypal patterns, for example. And we, as you said, why would you want to try and, you can’t break that, you know, that’s, it’s in us, right?

So why, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time, why not work with it? And it sounds like you’ve got a system here, you know, based on the work of Dr. Reese, that kind of really starts to enable you to do that.

Yeah, you know, I think it’s interesting because, you know, archetypes are a big tool in branding. And so I think everybody, all the strategists at Lpk have the hero and the outlaw on their shelves. And I guess the thing that I would say is, when I think about storytelling, screenwriting, novel writing, we talk about motivation, motivation of characters.

And that’s exactly what Reese has kind of uncovered. And so the stories that, the archetypal stories are filled with human beings that are motivated, they could be motivated by power, they could be motivated by lust, they could be motivated by curiosity. And so when we think about desires, it connects directly to story and the stories we tell for brands, but also gives us an understanding of why people buy brands.

I guess the other thing that I would say is, the longer I’ve been doing this, the more useful a framework becomes in our consultancy. So you said we’ve got lots of terminology, but what I found is, everybody comes to a project with a different point of view and a different way of interpreting the challenge. And often, especially at a creative agency, sometimes English is the second language of most visual people, right?

So they think in a visual way. And so sometimes we burn through a lot of transactional conversation just to try to find some sort of common language where we can understand each other. And what a framework does is it provides a starting point, at least for the conversation, where we could debate whether this brand is about vengeance or this brand is about power.

And at least it is a starting point for the conversation.

Absolutely, absolutely love it.

I was going through the Lpk blog last night and there was some great examples that you broke down into all those desires and you had like little short videos on each of them. One that stood out was actually the Gucci ad that you mentioned, it was like a nearly three minute ad that played at a late night on a TV channel. And did you want to talk us through, I guess, the desires behind that ad and why it works so well?

Refresh my memory, those were done a while ago.

Okay, so it was like there were two guys and a girl, they’re in like the silk, I was feeling the perfume, they’re in the silk and they’re just lounging about in the bed and in the, I think, Boudier silk, just lounging about. I guess they’re playing on the desires of lust and all of that, so.

Yeah, well, I think it’s interesting. So I think we were talking about Freud and Freud talks a lot about sex, obviously. And often when I talk about desires, I will talk about sex because it’s probably the most obvious one, right?

And so sex is a desire that we are literally driven to have, right? A sex drive. And when we think about the pleasure you get from sex, right?

You get sexual pleasure so that you will have sex. So if I think about it from our genes point of view, our genes want us to have sex and procreate. They entice us to do that because it’s pleasurable to do it.

And then depending on who you are, you interpret the codes of what you think is sexy. And so if you think about beauty, if you think about fashion, there are a number of different reasons why we indulge in say beauty or fashion. One could be around power.

So especially in beauty, what I found is beauty can be about sex, certainly, but it can also about wielding influence. People pay attention to beauty and they can be beguiled by beauty. And so if you’re not the strongest person in the room, your beauty can be a way to expand your influence.

Yeah, I definitely get that all the time.

I know, I can understand that. So that luxurious beard, I can’t stop looking at it. But so beauty can be used as a way of gaining acceptance as well.

So yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. The classic thing about beauty is everybody also always goes to sex, but it can be much more than that. There was a je d’or commercial with Charlize Theron from years ago where she’s walking toward the camera and she’s taking her jewelry off and she ends up taking all of her clothes off.

And it’s a Dior je d’or commercial, it’s perfume. And you look at that and you kinda go, okay, it’s a celebrity, it’s for a fashion company and she is hawking perfume and she’s taking her clothes off. What is distinctive about that?

Yet that at the time when that commercial came out, it was the number one most searched YouTube video for a span of time. And I just thought, is it because of Charlize Theron? Because there’s all kinds of stars doing these types of commercials.

And I happened to be working with a psychologist at the time and they’re talking about how men express power in their physicality. And it’s typically like this. And women typically will express power on hands on hips.

And the other thing was like men do a direct gaze. And there was something about the way that Charlize Theron was approaching that camera, shedding all the artifices of power, but really exuding power in her direct gaze, the way that her hands were near her hips. I just thought there might be something going on there.

Is there some coded kind of body language in that commercial? I have no idea whether it is or not, but it was at a time when I was starting to kind of wrap my head around this methodology, I just thought like, what is the thing that separates one YouTube video from another? And is it these coded signals that we are kind of interpreting without even knowing it?

Wow, wow, that’s amazing. As you were talking then, I literally just went into an arm fold and I don’t know, I didn’t even mean to do it. Yeah, I just, I went like that and then Jacob saw me, so I laughed and I was like, oh, oh, I better not.

I’ll be worried if it was the hip pose.

Yeah, the hip pose suits you, Jacob, it really does. So, so, yeah, fascinating, absolutely fascinating. You know, these desires, do you know something I don’t think we’ve actually done is actually just kind of run around the 16 hardwired desires.

Do you think that’s something that, Nathan, that you’d be able to do for us very briefly?

Sure, I’m going to have to bring them up because-

That’s fine, bring them up, there’s a lot of them.

Yeah, at this point, I’ve got the memory of a goldfish. So yeah, so I’ll just start with power. So power is the drive for influence, including leadership and mastery.

And one thing that I did fail to mention is that Reese did this research that developed this model over decades of his career as a professor of psychology. And it was done in an analog way, it was global research. And about 10 years ago, the University of Michigan, which ironically is a football rival to his university, did some corroborative research using fMRI data.

And it was a validation of Reese’s work because it not only just kind of eliminated this, what I would consider to be kind of this fluffy reputation of the word desire, and actually located the places in our brains where we actually process these desires. And what they found in the process of doing that research is that we also have fears, right? So one of the things that we know is that we are kind of using the kind of predictions of pleasure and pain to drive our behavior, and we’re essentially going toward the things that we desire and avoiding the things that cause us pain.

And one of the things that they found in the research is that the same part of your brain that processes, say, the desire for power also processes the pain or your fear of servitude or submission. And so that’s why you can often see brands kind of showing what you fear as a way to sell you what you desire, because whether we’re avoiding something that we fear or causing this pain or seeking the kind of fraternal twin, the desire that we want, the behavior is similar. You know, it gets us in the same place.

So avoiding pain, seeking desire, back to that idea of keeping us healthy, happy and socially effective. So power of curiosity is the desire for knowledge. The pain is boredom and apathy.

The pleasure of satisfying that desire is awe and wonder. Like just to be kind of blown away in a multi-sensorial way is just the ultimate payoff for curiosity. Independence is the desire for autonomy and being an individual.

So to blend out, to not be connected so much to a group. I’m going to avoid the pains and just kind of talk about the pleasure. So the pleasure is really about this idea of freedom and not being penned in.

So status or prestige, again, is this desire for social standing, including the desire for attention. And the feeling that you get is that of exclusivity or just feeling more important than your peers. Social contact is the desire for companionship or the desire for play.

And just the camaraderie or fun that you get from that can be something to think about. Talked about vengeance is the desire to get even, to compete. So this is about vindication and glory.

So think about brands like Nike, Under Armour. These brands are built upon winning. Honor is a desire that I don’t often see showing up in consumer brands.

So it’s the desire to obey a tradition or a moral code. The pleasure is the feeling of loyalty and conformity. So often military or religious institutions kind of play on this desire.

Idealism is the desire to improve society, including altruism or justice. A brand that is well loved that lives in this desire space is Patagonia. So just living by a credo, just fairness and compassion and fighting for a cause.

Physicality is one. So just like when you’re stuck in the house, you have that desire to kind of get out. It’s literally just desire to move your muscles and the feeling that you get when you engage in physicality is that of energy and vitality.

So there are brands like New Balance, Red Bull would be another example of a brand that kind of plays in that space. Talked a little bit about sex or romance. So sex is not simply about the act of sex.

It can be about flirting or the desire around courtship. And it is about lust and arousal. Axe or Lynx is a brand that has traditionally played in this space.

Family is the desire to raise children, lasting relationships. And one thing that I would say about family is in the branding space, it is not necessarily just about human beings. So people who own dogs will own dogs for a number of different reasons.

So one could be, I mean, think about the people who refer to their dogs as their baby, right? That is the desire for family. There are other people who own dogs for the prestige of it.

They just want to feel like their dog is better than your dog. And so there are a number of pet food brands that play in the desire for family in the pet food space. Sustenance is a fairly obvious one, kind of like sex.

So the thing that I would say about sex and sustenance is those are two desires that are fairly obvious because you kind of feel, you can feel in a physical way, in a visceral way when that desire is being stoked. And so people can easily talk about that, maybe a little bit more, or they’re at least more aware of it. Some of these other desires, it’s not like you kind of break out in a sweat when you’re curious.

So next would be acceptance, this desire for approval and the kind of fear of being rejected or feeling like people disapprove. So the pleasure that you get from that is that of self-confidence and fitting in. And so it’s interesting, we work with a number of spirits brands and Jim Beam is a kind of global whiskey brand, obviously.

It plays in the same space as Jack Daniels. But we know that from understanding the consumer of Jim Beam, that they use this brand to be accepted. It is a brand that is kind of a tried and true, they don’t out themselves as being posers by drinking Jim Beam.

It’s like a good pair of jeans. Tranquility is the desire to literally avoid anxiety. So this is brands that elicit safety, comfort, relaxation.

There is a brand in the US, Campbell Soup, which just kind of plays on this feeling of tranquility in eating soup. And then finally is savings. So savings is about collecting, accruing.

There’s obvious kind of financial connections to this. But also the value of kind of frugality, getting a deal. So the feeling of pleasure can be around ownership, accrual, and again, getting that deal.

So many of the value brands that we buy are playing in this space. So that is All 16 Desires.

So there you go, folks. You heard All 16 straight from Nathan’s mouth. Nathan, you talked us through those really, really well.

I’ve got shed loads of questions now to pile in on with you. So get ready. So the first question, you know, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, like I don’t know how familiar people are with that, but there was, you know, Maslow, Abraham Maslow basically suggested those particular needs that we as humans look for first before we move up to other sets of needs, right?

Is that, you know, is that the case with these desires? Like, do they, do you find that, you know, people can move past one desire to reach into another desire, or do you find that they’re all pretty standalone?

So when I think about Maslow’s, I think people often think about Maslow’s as a stair step. Like, and it is a stair step, but the thing that I think is interesting about Maslow’s is it’s not, that step is never permanent, right? So depending on your context, you could rock it up and down Maslow’s, right?

And so, you know, pandemic, a global downturn can instantly kind of, you can slide down that ladder pretty quickly. So in that Maslow’s is contextual, desires are the same way. So you can be in a situation where your desire for power is not even close to being on your mind, right?

But in a situation where people might be making all the decisions for me, my desire for power might be quickly elevated and kind of come to the floor. And so I often think about these 16 desires as kind of percolating in us. And so they may heat up and they may cool down.

I would also say that we, you and I, everybody, kind of have desires that I would call our factory settings. The desires that kind of what your mother would call you special. You’re special because your personality is kind of…

Matt got that a lot. I love that.

Yeah, Jacob’s very special.

So you might be a person who’s just driven by power or driven by curiosity. Designers are driven by curiosity. You can’t be a designer without being driven by curiosity.

So yeah, it’s interesting that they kind of percolate, but we all have our kind of favorites in our factory settings.

That’s absolutely fascinating. And I guess what that does is it means that you have to put yourself in the need state of the customer, don’t you? When they’re at any part of the customer journey, what is going to help them?

I like the way you phrased it at the start of this conversation. You kind of said, I want to give them the gift of what they want, right? Which I thought was brilliant.

You don’t look at it like… We don’t often look at it like that. But I think that is a very great way of looking at it, a very generous way of looking at it.

We want people to have what they want, right? And it’s often not the tangible, it’s the intangible, it’s the emotional experience. That’s what they want.

So we’re going to give that to them. So, yeah, contextualize where they are before… And think about the whole journey.

Would you agree with that?

I would. And I guess I would just say something you said made me twitch a little bit. Not because it was necessarily wrong.

I’ve made him twitch. Sorry about that. Correct the twitch.

You know, you can think of desires as a weapon. You know, just like… Well, like, you could just sell people with desires, right?

And you could stoke desires and get people to buy something that they may want, but they don’t necessarily need. And so I think designers come at their craft from the point of view of the user. And, you know, we always want to have positive human outcomes, you know, coming out of the work that we do.

And so for me, desires help me design with a level of precision that literally does give someone what they do indeed want, because we are all driven by desires, right? And we often just kind of think of, oh, you’re driven by the desire of power, and we think that that’s a bad thing, but it is what it is. You know, the desire for power is simply our desire to kind of influence our surroundings, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

So again, I’ve often been given this or been asked, you know, whether I think that knowing and using desires is maybe somehow a negative thing or deleterious or maybe, you know, just trying to use people to kind of stoke their desires. But I think of it more as really pairing up what people want from their lives with the products and services that…

Good. Another question for you on these 16 desires, particularly in your work and using them. And maybe you have answered this, so forgive me if it’s a silly question, but do you ever design for multiple desires at once?

How many can you cram into an experience? How many can you fulfill? Or do you find it better to focus on, make a call on which customer kind of segment, and the ones that need that thing, or want that thing, and would just design it around those folks?

Like how do you kind of navigate that one?

Yep, so two things. One is it’s interesting you brought up segmentation because desires can have an impact on segmentation, or it can kind of shine a light on the kind of promise driven segmentations. The other thing that I would say is, so it can be helpful for segmentation.

It can also be helpful in just kind of getting segmentations out of your life. And in this regard, so like if you think about, sometimes you intend to sell to a certain cohort, and weirdly, a totally different unexpected cohort falls in love with your product. And what that tells me is that it doesn’t have to be driven by demographics, you know, it’s like the certain age group of, you know, soccer mom or whatever.

We all kind of, the universality of desires is that we all have them. And so an example, an early example of this for me was, I don’t know if Scion was marketed by Toyota all over the world. In the United States, Toyota, the kind of average age of the Toyota buyer was creeping up.

It was kind of driving them nuts. So they decided to create a whole new brand for millennials. When millennials were starting to become a thing and they called it Scion and it was kind of funky, funky automobiles, really inexpensive.

So a few millennials bought it, but what they found was retirees were buying it at like a rapid rate. And it was just interesting to see because they were both utilitarian cars. They were both cheap, retirees are on a budget and they were baby boomers who had spent their lives not doing things the same way that their parents had done things.

So they liked the idea of a quirky kind of youthful car.

And so I think desires in that realm, so that’s about like independence blending out. I’m not gonna retire the way that my parents retired. And I’m not gonna retire in the same way that this person driving a Ford is retiring, right?

So in that way, you just don’t even have to worry about segmentation, just double down on this desire in a certain category and you’re going to be pulling people and people of like mind and like desires. From a, I mean, back to your question about one desire or two desires or three desires, from a security point of view, it would be nice to keep it to one desire, but sometimes there are well-established brands that you’re not going to upset the trajectory and success of an established brand just to make it fit into one desire. So what we often do is looking at the kind of understanding of the pleasure that people get from these brands, you might identify two desires.

What we try to do is make one be a little bit more dominant. So think about BMW. BMW is a brand that, you know, the ultimate driving machine was their tagline forever.

So that is about mastering driving and getting a high performance car that you can master driving, right? Over time, that brand became a luxury brand, became a brand that was about prestige. So BMW is an example of a brand that is kind of a mix.

And so yeah, sometimes you mix up brands. When it comes to segmentation, what we will often find is you want to identify the master brand desire. And as you get into different segments of the population, you might identify what we would call a spice desire.

You know, it just gives a sense of the category in which you’re playing. You know, as I said before, like what we notice that some categories have their kind of, the category captains as far as desires go. So you want to spice each segment up with a secondary desire sometimes.

Brilliant, brilliant. Yeah, and when I was talking about segmentation, funny enough, I was meaning it in the sense of psychographics, right? As opposed to demographics.

So I almost like, so I just jumped a step there. I assumed that you would look at audience types and think, okay, so we’ve got a demographic set, but 50% of this population are desiring prestige and the other 50% are desiring vengeance. So how do we balance the two up?

And from what you’ve said is you might select one to focus on and then make sure maybe there’s some spice. I love that. Spice it up, guys, with a little bit of something else.

Give it some flavor. Love it. Jacob, did you have any other sort of questions to add on this point?

So anyone else that wants to find out more information about these desires, how can people bring these desires into their own work? Where can they find more information about that?

Yeah, so certainly if you head to Lpk’s website, lpk.com, there is a fair amount of information there. And I guess the other thing that I would offer, you could hit me up. My email is nathan.hendricks at lpk.com.

You’re gonna get flooded.

Yeah, maybe. I’d be happy to share some information.

Yeah, wonderful. Well, that’s very generous of you. And in terms of your role then and what you do at Lpk and how you see, do you see yourself using this off into the future as the framework or do you see it ever sort of getting old and you moving on from this as a framework?

What are your thoughts on the longevity of this? Because you’ve said universal, so I pretty much assume that there are some truths in here that you wanna use in the future, but what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so to me, when we think about managing brands, we think about the things that are enduring about a brand, the things that you respond to, the things that your parents responded to, the way that future generations will respond in the same way. So, we’re kind of paleolithic in our makeup. And so it takes a while for us to change.

So we see desires as the enduring part of branding. There is an emergent part of branding, right? So if you think about the pleasure that you take in, say, pleasure that you take in grooming, there might be a moment in the future where that beard goes away.

You know Matt so well.

We’re grooming for you.

Took me hours, years, this beard to groom to its current state.

So we think about, we think, yeah, we think in terms of beauty standards for men and women, depending on your culture, depending on your age group, those are constantly changing those standards. But there are kind of basic human, kind of enduring pieces of the human experience that will always stay the same. And the goal is to kind of understand how to take that idea of family and what it means to kind of raise and rear and love a family.

What are the ways in which your parents did it? Hopefully they did it in a good way. And the way that future generations might think about rearing children.

So the joy and the intrinsic pleasure is going to be the same, but the way that people do it is gonna change.

Nice, so what you’re saying is these desires, they like kind of underpin the way that we are as humans, but as we express it, as we enact these various desires, over time with technology and culture shifts and sociology and trends, the way we will do it will change, but the desire will remain the same. So a very handy tool in the toolkit for anyone trying to tap into and help give the gift of what people want to them. So I think we’re pretty much about there at the end of the show.

I mean, we could probably have gone on for a number of hours on this topic, because it’s so fascinating. But I just wanted you to, well, I just wanted to thank you so much for carving out your time, your expertise, going through that so steadily and patiently with us. And also, for the examples that you showed us along the way, thank you so much.

Was there anything else you wanted to add, Nathan, just at the end of the show? Anything we’ve missed or perhaps any sort of tips or anything you’d like to sort of share?

Yeah, I guess back to the idea of a gift. So I’ve been doing this for a while now. And I guess two things that I would say is, one, this came out, this whole idea of desires and turning the desires into a methodology came out of a frustration.

So came out of a frustration of getting lousy inputs into the work that I was doing. Because ultimately, we do want to create work that people find useful, clear, delightful, basically worth it, right? So if you think about when we’re not designing with a level of clarity and precision, especially those of us who are designing things that ultimately go into a landfill somewhere, it’s kind of a horrible thought to think that the things that we design weren’t really desired in a powerful way, right?

So it’s like if it was a map on its way to the landfill, that feels really, really bad. So back to the idea of a gift. If you think about the worst gift, the lousiest, laziest gift that you can give someone, it would be a gift card, right?

Because you don’t know anything about that person, you’re just going to give them, or care anything about that person, you’re going to give them a gift card. If you cared a little bit more, you might ask, say it’s a nephew, you might ask their parents, like, what are they into? Oh, they’re into gaming.

I’ll get them a gaming gift card. That’s slightly less lame, I guess. But if you truly wanted to give someone a gift that they cared about, you would care about them.

You’d like really understand them, and you would care about them enough to put some thought into the gifts that you bought. And if I think about the best gifts that I’ve gotten are some of the gifts that I didn’t even think I wanted. They were just such a surprise, and they were just instantly wonderful.

They were gifts that I’ve kept forever. I never regifted, would never regift them. And so I just kind of think of design in the same way.

I’m looking to give you the most amazing gift, even if it’s a humble thing, in a way that you didn’t even know you wanted it. And it was worth my time, it was worth the careers of my client, it was worth the resources that went into creating it. And at the end of the day, we can all look ourselves in the mirror and say we did our best to connect.

That is awesome, that is awesome. Jacob, Anoop, just to make sure that we don’t, cancel that gift card, we’re about to send to Nathan.

Thanks so much Nathan, you’ve been an absolute star. Honestly, you’ve had loads and you’re super inspired, so thanks so much to you. Take care and have a lovely day.

Thank you.