I Want What I Need, But Do I Need What I Want?

By chance I came across an old version of the European edition of the iconic Principles of Marketing by Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders and Wong (1999). I read the first chapter where they outline the core concepts of marketing and what caught my attention and kept me reading was their distinction between the basic notions of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ and, in particular, the way in which they interrelate these notions.

Natural needs, cultural wants
In short, their idea is that human needs are ‘a state of felt deprivation’. They distinguish between physical needs (food, shelter, safety, clothing), social needs (belonging and affection) and individual needs (knowledge, self-expression). Human wants are the individually and culturally shaped expressions of human needs. To take their own example: ‘A hungry person in Bahrain may want vegetable curry, mango chutney and lassi. A hungry person in Eindhoven may want a ham and cheese roll, salad and a beer.’

Their point is that the two persons are reflecting the same need (hunger) in two different ways (desires or wants for different kinds of meals). So, needs are a relatively narrow set of non-cultural states of felt deprivation; wants are virtually unlimited expressions of needs.

Products as fulfillment
The logical connection between needs and wants implies that what we want is in some deep sense a reflection of what we need. As Kotler & Co. put it: ‘People satisfy their needs and wants with products. A product is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a need or a want’.

What is really striking about this view on needs, wants and products is that products and, by inference, marketing are seen as properties and activities that are designed to fulfill wants and needs. They are thinking stunningly linear about the relation between needs, wants and marketing in that the point of departure, the very driver that necessitates the whole process of marketing, are human needs. The emotional expressions of what we cannot live without.

However appealing and beautifully simple this line of reasoning is, it is nonetheless a serious oversimplification. The causality of the whole process of giving people what they think they want (called marketing) could be completely reverse.

On the nature of need fulfillment
Marketing is not just about creating offerings that satisfy needs, but also about creating wants that we certainly do not need. Tobacco is a paramount case. Being a former smoker, I know the strong urge for a cigarette. And yes, buying a package of cigarettes satisfied my desire for smoking. But the very thing is that this particular desire for cigarettes did not correspond to a basic need. Or so I will argue.

I suggest that we think of need fulfillment in two different respects. On the one hand we can think of immediate need fulfillment, which occurs when a need is directly satisfied by a product without requiring any intermediate processes. As an example, bread can right away satisfy the need for food without relying on any intermediate processes.

On the other hand we have what I call intermediate need fulfillment, which occurs when a product satisfies a need but does so only by relying on an intermediating process of some sort. As an example, think of cigarettes. One can consistently give voice to the view that cigarettes satisfy individual needs for self-expression and social needs for recognition. But the point is that they do so only by relying on the intermediate process better known as marketing. Cigarettes do not in themselves satisfy a need for social recognition the same way as bread satisfies a need for food.

Cigarettes can reasonably be said to genuinely satisfy human needs only if we rely on marketing as a go-between that influences the consumer to believe that cigarettes actually can play this role. Without having marketing as a mediating go-between, cigarettes cannot fulfill the social need for recognition, because there is no natural causal relation between cigarette consumption and social recognition.

Empty wants
Desires for bread refer to the need for food, but desires for cigarettes do not refer to the need for social recognition (though this is the need we assume it satisfies). Rather, the want for cigarettes refers to a marketing process, because cigarettes cannot satisfy the need for recognition without going through marketing and the consumer would not think of cigarettes in terms social recognition if marketers had not designed that link.

It is marketing that makes cigarettes capable of satisfying the need for recognition, because cigarettes simply do not have that ability in their own right. In this sense we can consistently make the claim that marketing is not just about offering products that satisfy wants, which refer to deeper needs; it is also pretty much about creating wants that are artificially designed to refer to needs. Like this, we often want what we do not need.

Reference
Kotler, P., Armstrong, G., Saunders, J. & Wong, V. (1999). Principles of Marketing – Second European Edition, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.