How iconic brands create demand for products people didn’t know they needed.
By Creatives Takeover Editorial Team · October 16, 2026
Some of the world's most successful products did not solve a problem people already had. They gave people a new reason to want something.
Some of the world's most successful products did not solve a problem people already had. They gave people a new reason to want something.
In 1967, fewer than 5 percent of brides in Japan received a diamond engagement ring. By 1981, about 60 percent did. Japanese life had not changed that much in fourteen years, and diamonds could not even be legally imported into the country until 1959, according to a famous 1982 investigation by the journalist Edward Jay Epstein. What changed was a sustained advertising campaign that made a diamond ring feel like the natural way to say "I love you."
That story challenges the most common advice in business: find a problem and solve it. Plenty of famous products did something different. They created the wanting first. This article looks at four brands from four countries and four different eras that built demand from almost nothing, the moves they have in common, and why some of that demand lasts a century while some fades within a year.
Wanting Is Often Built, Not Found
Most business advice assumes demand already exists and the job is to find it. That is true for a lot of products. But a surprising number of the biggest names in consumer goods did not wait for customers to ask. They decided what people should want, and then they taught them to want it.
This is not magic, and it is not simply clever advertising. The brands below followed a surprisingly similar pattern. They named a problem people had never put into words. They attached the product to an important moment in life. They invented a category and built a world around it. And, most recently, they turned wanting itself into a game. Each move works, and each comes with a risk.
Move One: Name a Problem People Didn't Know They Had
Listerine began in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic, and for decades it was a modest seller. In 1921, the company built its advertising around a new idea: "chronic halitosis," an obscure medical term for bad breath. The ads showed young men and women who were eager to marry but turned off by a partner's breath. Until then, bad breath was not widely treated as a serious social problem. Within about seven years, the company's revenue grew from $115,000 to more than $8 million.
Look closely at what happened. The mouthwash did not change. What changed was that people now saw a problem they had not worried about before, and the problem came with a solution on the shelf. The brand did not just sell the cure. It sold the fear that made the cure feel necessary.
The story also carries a warning. Decades later, in 1976, a US regulator ordered the company to correct advertising that claimed Listerine could prevent colds and sore throats. Naming a problem is a powerful move, but it works best when the problem is real enough that the product honestly helps with it.
Move Two: Tie the Product to a Moment in Life
De Beers faced the opposite situation: a product people liked but rarely felt they had to buy. In 1938 the company hired the advertising agency N.W. Ayer, which found that most Americans considered diamonds a luxury for the very rich. Before about 1930, few people proposed with a diamond ring at all. So the campaign did not promote De Beers as a brand or push any particular stone. It promoted the idea of the diamond itself, linked to courtship and marriage.
In 1947 a copywriter named Frances Gerety wrote the line "A Diamond Is Forever." Later campaigns added a guideline about how much a man should spend, which grew from one month's salary to two. That rule had no basis in tradition, yet repetition gave it the force of a social norm. The slogan ran for 64 years, until 2011, and Ad Age named it the top slogan of the twentieth century.
Then came Japan, where the same method worked in a market with no tradition of diamond rings. The campaign tied diamonds to Western modernity, romantic love and upward social mobility, and within about fourteen years the share of brides with diamond rings rose from under 5 percent to around 60 percent. When a product becomes the expected step in a life event, it no longer needs to be argued for. People feel strange not buying it.
Move Three: Invent the Category and Build a World Around It
Red Bull is a modern version of the same instinct. The Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz found a Thai tonic called Krating Daeng, which he said cured his jet lag. Instead of importing it, he spent nearly three years, from 1984 to 1987, working on the formula, the packaging, the positioning and the marketing concept for a new version. Red Bull launched in Austria on April 1, 1987, and the company describes it as the birth of an entirely new category: energy drinks.
Nobody had asked for a premium-priced can of "energy." Red Bull's founder understood that he was not only selling a drink. He was creating a category, with its own name, look and idea of when to reach for it. The scale of the result is easy to measure. In 2025 Red Bull sold nearly 14 billion cans in 178 countries, and its group turnover reached about 12.2 billion euros. More than 100 billion cans have been sold since launch.
The lesson is not that a clever name is enough. Red Bull treated the concept, the price and the story as part of the product from the first day. A new category needs all of them, because customers have no existing mental shelf on which to place it.
Move Four: Turn Wanting Into a Game
The newest example comes from China. The character Labubu was created in 2015 and began working with the toy company Pop Mart in 2019, but it became a global phenomenon only in 2025. Pop Mart sells many of its figures in "blind boxes," sealed packages that hide which figure is inside. A buyer cannot know what they have bought until they open it, and some figures are far rarer than others.
That design turns shopping into a small gamble and a social ritual. People bought, traded and compared, and resale prices climbed. On one Chinese resale app, a Labubu blind box hit a record of about 639 yuan in June 2025. Pop Mart's results showed the scale of the craze: 2025 revenue of 37.1 billion yuan, about $5.4 billion, up 185 percent from the year before, with net income more than quadrupling. The product had no job to do. It created excitement, belonging and the thrill of the hunt, and people paid for those feelings.
What the Four Brands Have in Common
Put the four stories side by side and three habits stand out. First, none of them sold features. They sold meaning: reassurance, love, performance, belonging. A diamond is a carbon crystal, a mouthwash is an alcohol rinse, and a blind box is a sealed bag, but nobody was buying those descriptions.
Second, they changed what felt normal. Listerine made fresh breath something you were expected to manage. De Beers made a diamond ring part of getting engaged. Red Bull made a can of energy part of a long day. Once an idea feels normal, the product no longer has to compete on argument.
Third, they were patient and they tested. De Beers kept one slogan going for 64 years. Mateschitz spent three years on Red Bull before a single can was sold. And according to one advertising history, Listerine's owner tested different messages and found the halitosis claim about four times more effective than the others, so he used it almost exclusively. Created demand looks like instinct from the outside, but it is usually built on repetition and measurement.
When Created Demand Fades
The Labubu story did not end there, and its second chapter is as instructive as the first. In March 2026, Pop Mart shares fell more than 20 percent after the company reported its record year, because investors worried the growth depended too heavily on one character. The Labubu family accounted for about 38 percent of revenue, and the shares had already fallen roughly half from their August 2025 peak.
The signs of cooling kept appearing. In May, Pop Mart recorded its first year-on-year decline in domestic online sales since 2024. The record resale price for a Labubu blind box had fallen by more than 84 percent. One analysis of web traffic suggested interest dropped sharply after a restock made the toys easier to buy, which points to how much of the thrill depended on scarcity. Pop Mart's answer has been to diversify, with other characters and a planned film, but whether it can find the next Labubu is an open question.
Set that beside the other three stories. De Beers built demand around a life event, and it has lasted for generations. Listerine tied itself to a social fear that people carry around every day, and the brand is still on shelves a century later. Red Bull attached itself to something people need constantly: energy. Labubu attached itself to novelty and scarcity, and those fade by design. The durability of created demand depends heavily on what it is attached to.
Why "It's Just Manipulation" Is Too Simple
It is tempting to dismiss all of this as manipulation, and parts of it deserve that criticism. Epstein's 1982 investigation described how De Beers engineered both the supply and the desire behind the diamond market, and Listerine's regulators did step in. But the explanation misses why these campaigns worked at all.
None of these brands invented a feeling from scratch. De Beers tapped the wish to show love and commitment. Listerine tapped the fear of social rejection. Red Bull tapped fatigue and the desire to perform. Labubu tapped the pleasure of surprise and of belonging to a trend. A brand cannot create a want out of nothing. What it can do is connect an existing human feeling to a product that had no obvious link to it. The demand was created, but the emotion behind it was already there.
Four Questions Before You Try to Create Demand
If you are building something that people are not yet asking for, these questions can guide the work.
- What feeling does my product connect to? Love, status, belonging, confidence, relief, excitement. A product with no emotion behind it has nothing to attach demand to.
- What moment in life could it become part of? The strongest demand is tied to a recurring event, such as a wedding, a workday or a birthday, so the choice stops feeling optional.
- What new word or idea could make the need visible? Halitosis and energy drinks both gave people a name for something they could not describe before.
- What will keep the wanting alive when the novelty ends? If your demand depends on scarcity or hype, plan the next chapter before the first one peaks.
The next time you find yourself wanting something that did not exist a few years ago, it is worth asking when, and how, you learned to want it. In 1967 the question would have made little sense to most Japanese brides. By 1981 the answer had already shaped the market.