From all my years in analysis and consulting, I feel I’ve discovered a factor or two about advertising and marketing price sharing. Enduring fundamentals, largely—but typically missed. So, this 12 months, I wish to share some snippets to your consideration. I hope they’re useful.
This week’s thought: Advertising is about needs, not wants.
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Perhaps I’m simply hung up on nomenclature, however my expertise is that advertising and marketing is about needs, not wants. These will not be two methods of speaking about the identical factor, regardless that we have a tendency to make use of these phrases in that method. The distinction issues, each in how we take into consideration and in how we supply out what we do as entrepreneurs.
There could also be no phrase extra frequent in advertising and marketing than “shopper wants.” The fixed chorus is needs-based this and needs-based that. Segmentation. Analysis. Methods. Concentrating on. Promoting. Events. And extra.
Advertising guru Philip Kotler — who wrote the textbook on which practically all entrepreneurs minimize their enamel — places wants on the very coronary heart of what we do: “A product that doesn’t meet shopper wants is ineffective.”
I’m actually not making an attempt to select a struggle with Phil. However I feel advertising and marketing is about one thing apart from wants. I can hear you gasping, or scoffing perhaps, however bear with me.
Except shoppers need one thing, it doesn’t matter whether or not they want it or not. They received’t purchase it.
Needs, not wants, encourage buying.
Wants is a fuzzy idea. If there’s a want {that a} shopper doesn’t wish to repair, it’s even a necessity? If shoppers are grousing or complaining, isn’t there an implicit need? Solely the thought of needs is smart of wants. Wants are outlined relative to needs. Not the opposite manner round. And if it takes wanting one thing for a must matter and even technically to exist in any respect, why are we bothering with wants?
The humorous factor about wants is that they exist solely compared to one thing else. It’s not true that wants robotically give rise to needs. Once we don’t know there’s something higher, we don’t know that there’s something we lack. We have now no wants. As a result of we’ve no needs.
Wants are gaps or deficits, and the usual by which we understand a spot is one thing else that we wish as an alternative. Which is to say that desires are the entire recreation. It’s not the necessity that creates the chance however the need.
Entrepreneurs visitors in needs, not wants. Promoting works by exhibiting one thing higher, one thing to aspire to, one thing to need relative to what shoppers have in the present day. Advertisements present needs. If adverts present wants, it’s only as a set-up for one thing to need. It’s the “need” that’s motivating and it’s the ‘need’ that entrepreneurs try to activate and allow.
In fact, there are occasions when shoppers need one thing with out entrepreneurs telling them what to need — cleaner garments, safer automobiles, cheaper eggs. It may actually be argued that there’s a want right here, on the very least an implicit want. That is what Kotler and others imply. However any such want arises solely as a result of one thing else is needed — folks know what they need and that creates the necessity of their minds.
There is no such thing as a want in any absolute sense. Wants are gaps relative to needs. Needs, not wants, are controlling.
Wants are sometimes derived analytically via analysis that contrasts what shoppers have in the present day with what shoppers may have tomorrow in the event that they solely knew. Customers don’t understand these wants till entrepreneurs convey them to their consideration. Which entrepreneurs do by stating — persuasively, it’s hoped — what to need. Needs are what matter.
Events are moments that folks need one thing to fill a necessity — absent any need, there is no such thing as a event. It might be extra correct to name these wants-based events than needs-based events.
The concept of constructing a product round a primary or common human want is basically simply constructing a product that addresses an issue practically everybody needs to unravel.
One other manner to consider wants versus needs is to revisit precisely what it’s that advertising and marketing is making an attempt to deal with. One other legendary determine, Ted Levitt, articulated it greatest when he wrote, “Merchandise are problem-solving instruments.” Entrepreneurs promote options to issues. Options are needs.
In accordance with Levitt’s mind-set, an issue is dissatisfaction, even with out data about one thing higher. Thus, a necessity may very well be disappointment or exasperation that there have to be or should be one thing higher. However right here once more, it’s wanting one thing higher that produces dissatisfaction. Needs are the ball recreation.
In Levitt’s best-known articulation of this concept, he provided the instance of drill bits. He famous that buyers don’t need quarter-inch drill bits. They need quarter-inch holes. Customers need the answer, not the product. The answer is one thing higher, which is why shoppers need it. Wants barely determine in. It’s all about needs.
Except shoppers need the answer — need the must be addressed, need the issue to be solved — there is no such thing as a product to be offered to them. Wanting just for wants is a variety of useless ends. Advertising alternatives come solely from issues folks wish to resolve.
Advertising typically fails when it tries to get folks to purchase what they don’t need. They could effectively want it, but when they don’t need it, needing it isn’t sufficient.
To not point out that oftentimes, we will persuade folks to need issues they don’t want. So, wants aren’t a primary requirement of selling. All it takes are needs, want or not.
A standard criticism of selling is that it sells folks issues they don’t want. Effectively, certain, it does. As a result of advertising and marketing, and enterprise extra broadly, satisfies needs, not wants. There may be nothing flawed with that. Individuals typically need what they don’t want. Needs are aspirations, and most aspirations go effectively past wants. Needs are what’s elementary to advertising and marketing.
No person wants comfort—life can actually go alongside simply tremendous with out it. However folks need comfort as a result of it makes life higher and extra satisfying, to which all people aspires.
There’s a extra expansive view of wants, which is Maslow’s hierarchy of wants. This well-known pyramid posits a hierarchy from primary, tangible wants of safety to compound, intangible wants of self-actualization. The developmental idea on this pyramid is that solely when lower-level wants are happy is it attainable for folks to fulfill higher-level wants, which pegs each aspiration to a necessity of some type.
However for me, this will get round. Needs are hiding in plain sight. The wants in Maslow’s pyramid are current within the context of wanting one thing higher, both recognized or tacit. Even when wants may in some way be higher outlined and demarcated, it’s wanting to maneuver up the pyramid that creates alternatives.
Resetting our advertising and marketing give attention to needs as an alternative of wants shouldn’t be a quibble about phrases. It’s to drive residence the purpose that advertising and marketing is an aspirational enterprise. Needs are aspirations; wants will not be. Entrepreneurs inform tales that increase folks’s imaginative and prescient of what’s attainable. Wanting up is the advertising and marketing narrative.
This makes advertising and marketing very completely different from the overall circulation of knowledge and communications. Politicians and media primarily visitors in narratives of loss. Politicians do it to demonize. Media do it as a result of, paradoxically, the character of reports and criticism is to search for what’s gone flawed. Clearly, I’m over-generalizing. However exceptions however, most of what folks encounter, significantly lately, is detrimental, not constructive.
Advertising can’t preach negativity, although. It’s needs that promote. Which supplies advertising and marketing a novel voice. One to domesticate each commercially and societally. It’s a particular voice that’s wanted now greater than ever.
Contributed to Branding Technique Insider By Walker Smith, Chief Data Officer, Model & Advertising at Kantar
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