Consumer Needs and Wants

Needs and wants reside within the discipline of motivation and are closely interlinked. Needs are the manifestation of physiological, personal, and/or social motives and wants are the means of fulfilling them. So, taking a simple example, an individual may need to buy a replacement car, and the car they want to buy to solve their transport problems is a brand new Jaguar. This want for a Jaguar will be based on their utilitarian expectations, for example, quality, safety and design, and their hedonic aspirations and fantasies for this brand. Accordingly, needs and wants are important constructs because they help us to understand the “what,” “why,” and “how” of behavioral choices that people make, individually and collectively.

The Economic Perspective

To understand needs and wants more fully, it is useful to consider them from three interpretative positions, namely (1) economic, (2) psychological, and (3) sociological and anthropological perspectives. The economic perspective maintains that needs are associated with “economic man,” whereby individuals act as rational, self-maximizing, economic individuals who engage in limitless goal-orientated consumption that offers them the most satisfaction from the products and services they buy. Examining this through expectancy theory, goal-orientated consumption thus becomes driven by the expectation of achieving a desirable outcome that will satisfy consumers' needs.

In consumption, then, consumers' choice of brands is influenced by their perceptions of what they judge will offer the most positive consequences for them. Thus, for marketers, the challenge becomes one of persuading consumers that their ongoing consumption of their brands offers the best choice in “feeding” their wants and thus satisfying their needs. Inherent within this perspective is the idea that although needs may be temporarily satisfied, wants do not diminish. Instead, with the choices offered by a plethora of marketing offerings, consumers can continue to accumulate possessions without exhausting their wants. This raises some important ethical questions for marketers, which will be discussed below.

The Psychological Perspective

The psychological perspective is well-represented by the ideas of Abraham Maslow, who urged for the cultivation of higher-order needs in order for individuals to attain self-fulfillment, and, in so doing, to nurture a more caring society. Maslow argued that all human needs are innate and fragile and thus should be protected from social forces that have the potential to destroy them, for example political and economic pressures. In his well-known hierarchy of needs, Maslow makes a distinction between upper- and lower-order needs, where individuals strive toward self-actualization as they move back and forth between their physiological, safety, belongingness, and ego needs. As Maslow argued, individuals are more likely to self-actualize if these needs are cultivated, and, where they are, the contribution of such individuals in helping to create a more empathetic society is significant. In this respect, Maslow maintained that need gratification should be encouraged because of the individual and collective benefits it brings.

Marketing offerings, then, are typically based on this needs hierarchy. However, marketers have typically been selective in what they have extracted from it, which has led to criticisms of marketing that encourages individuals to pursue lifestyles where their individualistic, conspicuous consumption of brands abounds with its transient benefits, with little consideration for others.

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