Consumer Motivation

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pull off some little trick to get people to buy your product or service?  Many such things have been tried in the past, but most of them are illegal, so let’s just stick to the basics.

Most, if not all, of our actions are driven by some sort of personal motivation.  There are a couple of different theories on what underlies our motivation.

Drive theory suggests that we have a ‘push’ that comes from an internal state of tension that dives us to need to relieve the tension by taking action.

Incentive theory is more of a ‘pull’ approach that suggests that something external motivates us to action.

From a marketer’s standpoint, it isn’t as important to know whether motivation is internally or externally driven.  It is important, however, to make sure that our value proposition is aligned with the type of need that our consumers are trying to meet.

If you consider which type of need your product or service is fulfilling, you can better motivate your target customer to action.

Types of Needs that Motivate Behaviour:

1. Social Needs
   Social needs are extremely powerful as they allow us to associate ourselves with one group or disassociate ourselves from another group.  Much of what we purchase is at least partly by our social needs.  Give special consideration to the types of ‘reference groups’ that your consumer uses.  You might have a great product for your consumer, but if it is not considered worthy by their reference group, then they are unlikely to purchase.
2. Functional Needs
   Functional needs are what we typically think of as our basic needs.  We need to eat food, so we need to buy food.  We need to keep warm, so we need to buy clothes.  Despite the basic requirements of our functional needs, consumers seldom only consider the ability of the good or service to serve their basic functional need.
3. Hedonic Needs
   These are the indulgences that we ‘need’ such as the luxury of leather seats in our car or the down feathers in our pillow.  As a marketer, considering hedonic needs is very important as even someone who is just trying to satisfy a functional need will always appreciate a bit of hedonism on the side.
4. Need for Cognition or Stimulation
   We humans have a lot of capacity for thought and creativity.  Just look at the popularity of crossword puzzles, Sudoku an Angry Birds.  Although we can get mentally exhausted, most of us need some level of stimulation.  Making people ‘think’ can be a good hook into your product or service as long as they are in a mental state to want the stimulation.

Good marketing isn’t about making people do something that they don’t want to do.  Good marketing is about understanding the consumer’s inherent needs and building an offering that will satisfy those needs.

If you can first understand what type of need your product or service is meeting, you can tap into the underlying motivation that will move prospective customers in your direction.

Chris McPhee, MBA
Email: Chris.McPhee@Marketing-Matters.org