“Do Marketers Create Need or Satisfy Need”

Submitted To:

Madam Sahar Hayat

Submitted By:

Syed Faizan RazaMBA (Executive) 1st Semester

Roll No: 192

Directorate of Distance Learning,

Bahauddin Zakaria University, Multan.

I suppose it could, but I tend to think the need comes first. A good general way to start a business is to identify a need and then offer a solution to that need. Your marketing efforts would be getting the word out that you can solve that need and why you can do it better than anyone else.

Of course many businesses have started by identifying a need most of us didn't know we had and in a sense created that need.

Marketing creates the perception of needs.

How many times have you gone into a store and left with more than you intended to buy?

And didn't those free-standing displays and the end-caps at the ends of the ailses offer goods that suddenly you just had to have?

And you probably never even knew thy made ortable 4 foot diameter fans, let alone that you needed one, until you went into Costco or Sam's Club and saw them. The discount clubs would probably go out of business if people only bought what was on their shopping lists when they went in the doors.

These are just common, everyday examples, but the same is true throughout sales organizations. They create "need" where none exists.

Marketing does not create a need.. it provides the solution to a need that was already present.. they just may not have known about it yet. For example....lets say you've been working all day, you're tired, you skipped lunch but you're not hungry... you come home, sit down and put your feet up and turn on the tube. A commercial comes on... mmm you're indundated with pictures of fresh ingredients, combined with a low cost, served at a fast pace...suddenly you're hungry. The commercial served as a reminder to a need you'd forgotten about. There are tons of other examples, but this one was quickest...marketing is about getting the info out there and solving their needs...

Remember, most people make purchases based on emotion - and then justify that purchase with logic later on.

It is controversial issue, both those who believe that marketing create needs and those who believe that marketing does not create needs but only satisfy it have real examples! The marketing function is to search needs and then satisfy it! But the issue that some companies create needs, so we should not call it Marketing, because none of the marketing function is creating needs, therefore we should call it something else, I say it should be called Pre-Marketing.

The marketing philosopher Philip Kotler says: “Marketers do not create needs: Needs preexist marketers, marketers along with other societal factors, influence wants. Marketers might promote idea that Mercedes would satisfy a person’s need for social status. They do not, however, create the need for social status”. (Philip Kotler, Marketing Management: eleventh edition, chapter one, page no.11)

But now a days companies do more! They educate people and give them reason to buy their products and this is what people might call it “creation of needs” people purchase something when they need it, if they think they do not need the product they may not purchase it. How many people today in Pakistan need I-pod? How many people really need Mobile + Internet + Camera + TV all in one set? I have asked many people why you have purchased color big display Mobile-Phone with camera. They haven’t answered me yet. How many people really need to go to space? They don’t need it at all, but they go. Can we call it marketers created their needs? We know creation of need is not the function of marketing, so we should to accept a more powerful tool than marketing, and we should search how to give it a suitable name?

Does marketing really create needs? The distinction between needs and wants helps put into perspective the charge that ‘marketers create needs’ or that ‘marketing makes people want things they don’t need’. Neither marketing nor any other single social force can create needs deriving from the biological andemotional imperatives of human nature. On the other hand, marketing activities – and many other social forces – do influence people’s wants. Indeed, a major part of the marketer’s job is to help develop an attractive product or service, then stimulate customers ’wants for it by convincing them it can satisfy one or more of their needs better than available alternatives.

The distinction between real and artificial human needs relies on the distinction between a good’s use value and symbolic value:

Real needs are satisfied by a good’s use-value.

Artificial needs are satisfied by a good’s symbolic value.

But what does it mean for goods to have a use-value only?

Lets take clothes, a basic-needs good, as an example. If clothes are to serve the sole purpose of protecting the human body from several environmental conditions, then we really only need one type of t-shirt, two types of trousers (one short, one long), no skirts (as their utility is lower than that of trousers), one jumper and one coat, for all human beings irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, or other cultural bases of differentiation.

Since what was described as ‘real’ needs is not necessarily identical to ‘basic’ needs let’s also take a different example: cars. If you’re a bachelor you get a 3-door car, if you have a family of four a 5-door, if you have more children a mini-van, if your job requires a truck of some sort. The same thing goes for pretty much all other products such as your home, its furniture, appliances and interior decoration.

In short, the only bases of differentiation in such a society are objective and scientific: occupation, life-stage, number of children, gender (only in certain cases) and a few others. I believe that this notion of real needs is based on an unrealistic understanding of the nature of human needs – in that it is asocial and therefore not human – due to the degree of cultural uniformity that it demands.

Now let’s look at the way in which what is called customer needs, but is in fact nothing more than human needs, are created in a human society.

Women in the west have not escaped their long history of bodily objectification and perhaps never will. With their newly won power however, they have managed to

1. escape their possession by men, be that husbands or fathers, and

2. objectify men in their turn

It is at this point that the balance of the equilibrium of sexual power changed and men started to look at their own butts in the mirror when buying a pair of jeans, which is to say that men are now looking at their own body through the eyes of some abstract female subject who is their object of desire, and who they want to satisfy by offering her what they think she wants.

It was not a capitalist marketer that started bodily objectification however. It has existed across cultures since time immemorial. Greek marble statues are a case in point.

Most importantly, it was not a capitalist marketer that brought about the emancipation of women for the purpose of bringing about the objectification of the male body in order to sell skin care products and fashion items to men. By means of acquiring certain rights for themselves – political (the right of women’s suffrage), economic (equal contract and property rights), reproductive (the right to control one’s reproductive functions), personhood (right to own their own person rather than be owned by their fathers or husbands along with their children – abolition of chattel marriage) – women had the freedom, and hence power, to choose their sexual partner. One of the results was that women acquired a gaze that had the power to objectify men and their body parts in an explicit manner.

Finally there is nothing contradictory to manhood in a man’s utterance of a sentence like “I have an oily T-zone”.

It seems plain that the growing needs for products such as cosmetics, diets and fashion items that men have cannot be attributed to marketing need creation for the purpose of profit making but is the direct result of the emancipation of women. The ‘new men’ or ‘metrosexuals’ are precisely such a creation.

At the same time it would be interesting to think whether real needs are in fact only basic needs. Is a human’s need for music for example a real need? It certain that something that can be defined as music can be found in all human societies (although it would be hard to define music in a universal way). But I dont think its basic. I mean it would certainly not be an issue of survival if music ceased to exist in some way or other.

I just want to say after this complete disscsion that:

“Marketing creates the perception of needs”