Man is a bundle of desires. His needs, wants and desires are endless. Human needs are the basic requirements they include food, sleep, thirst, shelter, clothing and reproduction. Without these humans cannot survive. An extended part of needs today have become education and healthcare. In marketing generally any products and services falling under the category of needs don’t need pushing. For example bedding, food is basic necessities of life.  Man must have some food to live, some clothing to cover his body and some sort of shelter to protect himself against the changing weather, and also against his enemies. Without these things man’s life would be impossible.

As man has become civilized, he is not satisfied with bare necessities of life. Even when the problem of basic existence has been solved, the struggle of life remains as keen as ever. The struggle now is for the comforts and joys of life. As man becomes more civilized, his wants multiplicity. He wants better food, fashionable clothing, comfortable lodging, a big car and so on.

A want is defined as having a strong desire for something. Instant gratification of fulfilments of wants is where the role of marketing comes in. Human wants are unlimited, when a particular want is satiable, other recurs. Wants are competitive, wants are both complementary and competitive, and wants need to be satisfied in urgency. Examples of wants is designer ware, ornaments, membership of clubs, position in society, holidays in foreign destinations, lots of money in bank account etc.

Desire is the emotion of longing or wanting for a person, object, or outcome. In that sense it is expressed as “craving”, “longing”, “passion”, “drive” and many more. When a person desires something or someone, the sense of longing gives them the excitement. A new study by researchers at Ohio State University has concluded that people have 15 fundamental desires and values that guide their behaviour. These desires include basic needs, such as food, as well as social desires such as prestige, social contact and honor etc. These desires guide our actions. The beliefs and desires interact with each other to produce intentions, and these intentions lead to actions. So when we see someone’s behaviour and action, we try to figure out what set of beliefs and desires were behind those actions. Sometimes we can just ask the person, but sometimes we can hypothesize about his/her unknown beliefs and desires. This is proved over centuries through various folk-theory of human behavior.

I cannot resist giving a positive example of the self-made young billionaire and CEO of electric car maker Tesla and space exploration company SpaceX Elon Musk who is also co-founder and chairman of artificial intelligence research non-profit OpenAI, Musk goes on with his innovative ideas and chases the end results till he achieves them. He started a company called Neurolink to merge the human and machine interfaces also he launched Boring company to dig underground tunnels to reduce traffic jams. Musk sleeps just six hours per night, rest of the time he work on completion of his superb ideas. So what keeps him motivated? He says “The thing that drives me is that I want to be able to think about the future and feel good about that.” His desire of making a good future for mankind is a positive desire.

When it comes to values and desires, one size does not fit all. People come with different beliefs, values and desires. There does not seem to be any fixed hierarchy of values fitting all. But, the fact is all human activity is prompted by desire.

Desire is connected to your purpose in life. We are all born with a desire to do something significant in life. Our desire is unique to us and connected with natural abilities we were born with. Our desires guide us all through life. I think we are given the desire to be something and are blessed with the natural abilities to achieve it. For example a good Gardner is born with the abilities in mowing, trimming and pruning; he/she is born with strong manual skills. Has precision and attention to detail. And most importantly is fond of flowers, trees, shrubs, plants and enjoys being in a garden. Therefore in the need, want and desire pyramid, desire lies at bottom occupying more space.

Unending cycle of needs wants and desires

The world of marketing is surviving because of the unending cycle of need, wants and desires.  Human needs, wants and desires are unlimited. We may satisfy some of our wants but soon new wants arise. It is impossible for marketers to produce goods and services so as to satisfy all wants of people. Thus scarcity explains the relationship between limited resources and unlimited wants and the problem there in.

The biggest marketing fact is people care about themselves and not companies. People are bursting with needs, wants and desires, and they buy products just to satisfy those emotions. Customers care about products only when they have a specific need that must be fulfilled. And, marketers must realise this fact.

Post Purchase Blues

Marketers must also realize that people are emotional creatures. They purchase goods and services based on emotion which they later justify with logic. It takes seconds to make a purchasing decision, and dopamine (the feel good neurochemical) rises in the presence of well packaged, glossy good looking new objects. When emotions rule, the credit card is swiped or payment is made in cash. And when dopamine ebbs buyer’s remorse sets in. Then customers use logic to justify their emotional purchase. This is called post purchase blue in marketing. But then the disappointment generates stress when the post-purchase experience is nothing like what it was to be wooed by the sales team.

All the activities and experiences that follow purchase are included in the post purchase behavior. Usually, after making a purchase, consumers experience post-purchase dissonance. They sometimes regret their decisions made. It mainly occurs due to a large number of substitutes/alternatives available, good performance of alternatives or attractiveness of alternatives, etc.

The marketers most often need to convince and to assure the consumer that the choice made by them is the right one. The seller can mention or even highlight the important features or attributes and benefits of the product to address and solve their concerns if any. A high level of post-purchase discord is negatively related to the level of satisfaction which the consumer draws out of product usage.

Conclusion

Needs, wants and desires are the three important terms in marketing. No matter how similar they might seem, there are more differences in these terms and are complex to understand. There are many layers within them and they play a vital role in arriving at making decision of segmenting, targeting and positioning for a brand.

Age catches up with all of us, but in the marketing profession it catches up a bit too faster than anywhere else. Age is experience. Age is the time period a person or thing has survived till date. Age is a sign of survival. It is said that age brings wisdom. Age brings knowledge. But, the fact is age is just a number in our minds.

Every phase of life is important; one should experience each phase in life. Every age has its own essence. Be it a 1 year old child, 16 years old teenager, 35 years old man or a 90 years old man. We see different behaviours in people at different ages. Different marketers offer different interpretations of age. Jan Gooding, Global Inclusion Director at Aviva Insurance, believes that age discrimination has always been acute in advertising agencies; it might be lesser in client marketing departments.  She recalls her own experience of facing age discrimination in her mid-40s when, having run her own consultancy and worked as head of strategic communications at BT (British Telecommunications) for three years, she considered returning to agency management.

Disparity in employing older people: Behaviour is the way one conducts himself; it is the way one behaves. One’s behaviour is influenced by several factors like health, mentality, surroundings, society, culture, tradition and age is of course one of the parameters among others. We see 76 years old behaving more chirpy and happy than 36 years old. Therefore disparity in employing older people is certainly not rational. This disparity in employing older people varies sector by sector. But, we see great discrepancy in the beauty sector, where 44% of marketers feel older people are either under-represented or not represented.

While young people have boundless energy and they offer a certain valuable perspective to a business, we also see that most people improve with age, and have decades of experience and wisdom that can’t be matched by someone few months or few years out of college. I would love to give an example of feminist icon Gloria Steinem. At 80 plus years, which is practically considered dead by Silicon Valley employers, Steinem dint withered away since her activist days in the ’70s. In fact, according to her friend and fellow activist Robin Morgan, she is more effective than ever. “She is a better organizer now than she ever has been. She’s a better persuader. She’s a better writer than she ever has been if she’d give herself the time to sit down and write,” Morgan told the New York Times recently. Throughout her life as a public figure, Steinem has continued to reshape the way people view aging, pushing back against the misguided ageism in American culture. At 40, she famously came out, so to speak, telling a reporter “This is what 40 looks like.” At the time, it was common for women over 30 to lie about their age. Since, she has stormed into each new decade proudly, and claims to love getting older. In her own words fifty was a shock, because it was the end of the centre period of life. But when she turned 60 she looked and behaved great. Seventy was greater. She has always loved aging. Her mantra is “we don’t have anything permanent, so go on with life” If anything changers periodically, it is our age.

The number of 60 plus older is growing in developed and developing nations all over the world. But as a society we are still are not ready to embrace the aging population, gereopsychologists (psychologists who work with old age related problems) say that those who are 60 or older may all too often find themselves the victims of ageism. In fact, in a survey of 84 people ages 60 and older, nearly 80 percent of respondents reported experiencing ageism–such as other people assuming they had memory or physical impairments due to their age, which is not true at all.

Message to marketers: Need is necessity. There is a very slim line of difference between need and want; needs describe basic human requirements such as food, air, water, clothing and shelter. But, people also have strong needs for recreation, education, and entertainment. These needs become wants when they are directed to specific objects that might satisfy the need. Need recognition is the basic step in the buying process. Every age has a different list of needs. It depends on an individual’s age to decide whether a product is a need or not. This process of need recognition is greatly influenced by the age factor of the buyers.

But, we see 60-70 years old guys buying products and services enjoyed by teenagers. In terms of their general behaviour, seniors tend toward seasonal migration to warm climates and to earlier bedtimes. Two distinct sub segments seem to exist–the “young old,” aged to 74, and the “old-old,” those 75 and above. The young-old are active, vibrant, and healthy. The old-old are less healthy, more sedentary, and less sharp in their mental and physical abilities. There are twice as many young-olds as there are old-olds. The elderly increasingly exhibit a trend toward “gray pride” which is a positive identification with their age and away from the negative stereo-type as ’poor’, ‘depressed’, ‘physically deteriorated’, and ‘inactive’. Perhaps the most impressive difference between oldsters and younger age groups is the combination of flexible time and money. The purchasing power of this segment has been estimated at between $60 and $200 billion. So you find them everywhere – night clubs, dance floors, yachting, paragliding, jungle safaris, playing tennis and cricket. They like to buy flashy clothes, variety of foods and beverages. They like to go driving, shopping movies etc. Lets the marketers not use the older demographic notion of buying behaviour.

The world is experiencing an exceptional increase in average life expectancy and population aging, described as a revolution in longevity. In the twentieth century, the industrialized world gained some 30-40 additional years of life, greater than had been attained during the preceding 5,000 years of human history and transforming what was once the experience of the few to the destiny of many. It is time that marketers must realise that they must discard ageism from their dictionary. The so called “aged” population is economically liberal, knowledge, maintains good health and most importantly, is ready to ENJOY life.