• by J. Walker Smith , Op-Ed Contributor, March 12, 2025

From all my years in research and consulting, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing worth sharing. Enduring fundamentals, mostly — yet often overlooked. So, over the course of my biweekly column this year, I want to share some snippets for your consideration. I hope they’re helpful.

This week’s thought: Marketing is about wants, not needs.

Maybe I’m just hung up on nomenclature, but my experience is that marketing is about wants, not needs. These are not two ways of talking about the same thing, even though we tend to use these terms in that manner. The difference matters, both in how we think about and in how we carry out what we do as marketers.

There may be no phrase more common in marketing than "consumer needs." The constant refrain is needs-based this and needs-based that. Segmentation. Research. Strategies. Targeting. Selling. Occasions. And more.

Marketing guru Philip Kotler -- who wrote the textbook on which nearly all marketers cut their teeth -- puts needs at the very heart of what we do: “A product that doesn’t meet consumer needs is useless.” 

I am certainly not trying to pick a fight with Phil. But I think marketing is about something other than needs. I can hear you gasping, or scoffing maybe, but bear with me.

Unless consumers want something, it doesn’t matter whether they need it or not. They won’t buy it. Wants, not needs, motivate purchasing.

Needs is a fuzzy concept. If there is a need that a consumer doesn’t want to fix, it is even a need? If consumers are grousing or complaining, isn’t there an implicit want? Only the idea of wants makes sense of needs. Needs are defined relative to wants. Not the other way around. And if it takes wanting something for a need to matter or even technically to exist at all, why are we bothering with needs? 

The funny thing about needs is that they exist only in comparison to something else. It is not true that needs automatically give rise to wants. When we don’t know there is something better, we don’t know that there is something we lack. We have no needs. Because we have no wants.

Needs are gaps or deficits, and the standard by which we perceive a gap is something else that we want instead. Which is to say that wants are the whole game. It’s not the need that creates the opportunity but the want.

Marketers traffic in wants, not needs. Advertising works by showing something better, something to aspire to, something to want relative to what consumers have today. Ads show wants. If ads show needs, it is only as a set-up for something to want. It is the "want" that is motivating and it is the ‘want’ that marketers are trying to activate and enable.

Of course, there are times when consumers want something without marketers telling them what to want — cleaner clothes, safer cars, cheaper eggs. It could certainly be argued that there is a need here, at the very least an implicit need. This what Kotler and others mean. But any such need arises only because something else is wanted — people know what they want and that creates the need in their minds.

There is no need in any absolute sense. Needs are gaps relative to wants. Wants not needs are controlling.

Needs are often derived analytically through research that contrasts what consumers have today with what consumers could have tomorrow if they only knew. Consumers don’t perceive these needs until marketers bring it to their attention. Which marketers do by pointing out — persuasively, it is hoped — what to want. Wants are what matter.

Occasions are moments that people want something to fill a need — absent any want, there is no occasion. It would be more accurate to call these wants-based occasions than needs-based occasions.

The idea of building a product around a basic or universal human need is really just building a product that addresses a problem nearly everyone wants to solve. 

Another way to think about needs versus wants is to revisit exactly what it is that marketing is trying to address. Another legendary figure, Ted Levitt, articulated it best when he wrote, “Products are problem-solving tools.” Marketers sell solutions to problems. Solutions are wants.

By Levitt’s way of thinking, a problem is dissatisfaction, even in the absence of knowing about something better. Thus, a need could just be disappointment or exasperation that there must be or ought to be something better. But here again, it is wanting something better that produces dissatisfaction. Wants are the ball game.

In Levitt’s best-known articulation of this idea, he offered the example of drill bits. He noted that consumers don’t want quarter-inch drill bits. They want quarter-inch holes. Consumers want the solution not the product. The solution is something better, which is why consumers want it. Needs barely figure in. It’s all about wants.

Unless consumers want the solution — want the need to be addressed, want the problem to be solved — there is no product to be sold to them. Looking only for needs is a lot of dead ends. Marketing opportunities come only from problems people want to solve.

Marketing often runs aground when it tries to get people to buy what they don’t want. They may well need it. But if they don’t want it, needing it isn’t enough. 

Not to mention that oftentimes, we can persuade people to want things they don’t need. So, needs aren’t a basic requirement of marketing. All it takes are wants, need or not.

A common criticism of marketing is that it sells people things they don’t need. Well, sure it does. Because marketing, and business more broadly, satisfies wants not needs. There is nothing wrong with that. People often want what they don’t need. Wants are aspirations and most aspirations are well beyond needs. Wants are what’s fundamental to marketing.

Nobody needs convenience—life can certainly go along just fine without it. But people want convenience because it makes life better and more enjoyable, to which everybody aspires.

There is a more expansive view of needs, which is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This well-known pyramid posits a hierarchy from basic, tangible needs of security to compound, intangible needs of self-actualization. The developmental concept in this pyramid is that only when lower-level needs are satisfied is it possible for people to satisfy higher-level needs. Which pegs every aspiration to a need of some sort.

But for me, this gets circular. Wants are hiding in plain sight. The needs in Maslow’s pyramid are present in the context of wanting something better, either known or tacit. Even if needs could somehow be better defined and demarcated, it’s wanting to move up the pyramid that creates opportunities.

Resetting our marketing focus on wants instead of needs is not a quibble about words. It is to drive home the point that marketing is an aspirational enterprise. Wants are aspirations; needs are not. Marketers tell stories that raise people’s vision of what’s possible. Looking up is the marketing narrative.

This makes marketing very different from the general flow of information and communications. Politicians and media mainly traffic in narratives of loss. Politicians do it to demonize. Media do it because, paradoxically, the nature of news and criticism is to look for what’s gone wrong. Obviously, I’m over-generalizing. But exceptions notwithstanding, most of what people encounter, particularly these days, is negative not positive.

Marketing cannot preach negativity, though. It’s wants that sell. Which gives marketing a unique voice. One to cultivate both commercially and societally. It is a special voice that is needed now more than ever.