Tapping Into Human Needs

 

I am excited to announce that I have developed a new inexpensive online course entitled "Tapping into Human Needs." 

This one-hour seminar will help you better understand human needs and motivations. This understanding should inform brand positioning, marketing copy, selling scripts, and unique value propositions. We will cover Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, The Triune Brain, the power of fear, the two scarce resources (time and money), thirty-six powerful human motivators, how to differentiate brands by human need and eleven different market segmentation approaches. This seminar features several well-known brands as examples and six advertising videos associated with three of those brands. I think you will find a few of those ads to be quite timely and relevant. It also includes a few exercises and links to relevant online articles and blog posts. 

At the end of this seminar, you will have a much deeper insight into human motivation and how that relates to marketing and brands.

Click here to learn more about the course.

Marketing and the Deep Understanding of Human Behavior

The best marketers understand why people behave in the ways that they do. They understand people's underlying phobias, fears and anxieties. They understand their hopes and aspirations. And they understand their attitudes, convictions and values.

The best marketers constantly observe human behavior but also strive to understand the motivations that underpin that behavior. The best marketers have some of the skills of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists and they are constantly conducting informal ethnographic research.  

Do you know what it is like to live and work in a big city such as New York? Do you know what it is like to live and work on a dairy farm? How about a ranch? Do you know what small town life is like? What is it like to be a poor unemployed African American in a dangerous urban neighborhood? What is it like to be a CEO? Or an oil rig worker? Or a soldier who has seen the worst of war? Or the son of a high profile politician? 

What's it like to live in Burlington, Vermont or Corpus Christi, Texas or Boulder, Colorado or Akron, Ohio? What is it like to live in Tokyo or Zurich or Almaty, Kazakhstan? 

What is it like to live in Cuba today? What is it like to live in Syria today? What is it like to live in Papua, New Guinea today?

What is it like to not have a car and only use pubic transportation in a big city? What is it like to not have a car and to walk or ride your bicycle everywhere?

What is it like to never get any exercise other than pushing the buttons on a remote control? What is it like to work out two hours a day and have a perfectly sculpted body?

What is to like to live in the jungle? What is it like to live in the desert? What is it like to live on a remote island?

What is a mother who just lost her teenage son in a tragic traffic accident feeling? Or a father who's daughter just won a gold medal in the winter Olympics? What is going on in a Tea Partier's head? How come some people are so liberal? What does it feel like to be a 45 year-old laid off factory worker who has not worked for five years?

If you are pro-life, do you really understand what motivates pro-choice people? If you are pro-choice, do you really understand what motivates pro-life people? If you are a strong gun control advocate, do you understand why some people will fight to the end to preserve their right to bear arms? If you are a gun advocate, can you put yourself in the shoes of a staunch gun control advocate?

What is it like to have grown up Mormon? What is it like to have grown up as an Evangelical Christian? What is it like to have grown up in a nudist colony? 

What is it like to have grown up with an abusive father? What scars remain from having been raped as a teenage girl? What is it like to have had a near death experience? What is it like to have experienced altered consciousness as the result of a drug induced trip? Why do some people have strange compulsions?

Why are some men afraid of strong women? Why are some people so self-centered? What is it like to have grown up in an orphanage? What is it like to be a refugee? What would life be like if you knew that you had a disease from which you could die at any moment? What is it like to be HIV+? 

How does it make you feel that your spouse makes five times as much income as you do? How do you feel about graduating in the bottom 10% of your class? What's it like to win $100 million in a lottery? What if your brother is a doctor, your sister is a lawyer and you are an unemployed contractor?

These scenarios are just the tip of the iceberg. My point is that marketers should constantly consider how others are feeling, what their insecurities are, what pressures they have to bear, what forms their attitudes, what their beliefs are and what fears drive their behaviors. Because marketers need to know what motivates people. And the only way to do that is to understand people, not just at a superficial level, but deep down. 

And it would help to understand different societies and cultures and even to understand different psychological disorders such as social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, narcissistic personality disorder and hypomania. 

It is even instructive to know the different motivators for people's religious fervor. A good book to stimulate your thinking on this is The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Further, it would be very helpful to understand what it is like to be a working poor person, a blue collar worker, an upper middle-class professional and the member of an elite uber-rich family. 

Again, marketers must strive to really understand human motivations at a deep level. I wish you great success in developing your anthropology, psychology and sociology skills. 

Giving People What They Long For

Brands can promise anything. Sometimes, they promise functional benefits. Sometimes they promise a specific experience. Sometimes they promise self-expression. Sometimes they evoke a specific emotion. So why not give people exactly what they want. Which begs the question, "What do people want?"

Here are some of the things that people long for:

• They want to feel safe.
• They want to feel financially secure.
• They want a place they can call home.
• They want to feel loved.
• They want to enjoy the company of friends.
• They want to be free to pursue their passions.
• They want to express themselves creatively.
• They want to feel smart.
• They want to achieve great things.
• They want to be respected.
• They want to be recognized for their accomplishments.
• They want to play.
• They want to laugh.
• They want to dance.
• They want to be told a good story.
• They want to be entertained.
• They want to enjoy the beauty of nature.
• They want to savor the taste of good food.
• They want to feel the sensation of the warm sun or a gentle breeze.
• They want to feel the rush of adrenaline. 

These are just some of the things that people long for. You would do well to integrate one or more of these into what your brand delivers.

Should Marketers Rely on the Reptilian Brain to Motivate People?

Roughly, the brain can be divided into three parts, the reptilian, the limbic and the neocortex. The reptilian brain focuses on survival and is primarily driven by fear but also includes emotions such as aggression, greed, dominance and submission. The limbic system is the emotional part of the brain and it relates pain and pleasure to activities that hurt and help you. It does this by linking particular activities to pain and pleasure in one's memory. The neocortex is the newest addition to the human brain. It controls functions such as logic, reasoning, creative thinking, language, the integration of sensory information and other higher thinking functions.

Marketers have found that people make decisions primarily based on emotions, and in particular, the emotion of fear. That is, people primarily use the reptilian and limbic parts of their brains to make decisions even if they view themselves as being highly evolved rational human beings. 

Here is what I would ask marketers to consider. Through fear-based brand messages, we continue to fan the flames of peoples' fears, fears that cause anxiety and irritability and often irrational behaviors. While this usually works, I would ask you to consider brand campaigns based on noble values - freedom, beauty, grace, kindness, compassion, joy - these sorts of things. Consider Dove's Real Beauty campaign or Patagonia's Don't Buy This Jacket campaign or even Newman's Own's All Profits to Charity approach. All three campaigns are highly successful. 

Marketers can make a positive difference in the world by helping humans move beyond the ancient reptilian brain to parts of our brains that are more aligned with how we want to evolve as a species.