CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree review [part-9]
In this part of the series I am going to discuss Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how it can be effectively used in marketing to optimize your marketing efforts for targeted audience. We are also going to see a modern version of Hierarchy of Needs based on Evolutionary Psychology and Motivation.
Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
Introduction
The concept of Hierarchy of Needs is proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943. He published a paper named “A theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review. Maslow also published a book in 1954 named as “Motivation and Personality” and in this book he fully expressed this theory of Hierarchy of Needs.
In this theory of hierarchy of needs, Maslow suggested that people usually gets motivated based on their needs and he explained that people unconsciously choose a 5 level system to decide or prioritize their actions. These five levels of needs are as follows (listed in order of their importance):
- Psychological & Physiological needs
- Safety needs
- Love needs
- Esteem needs
- Self Actualization
Below, I am going to briefly explain these levels and the category of needs they fall into (please check above image for reference and better understanding).
Basic Needs
The first two levels comes under the basic needs category.
Level 1 — Psychological and Physiological needs
This level deals with basic biological, psychological and physiological needs of a person. These needs includes but not limited to:
- Clean Air
- Clean Water
- Food
- Sleep
- Cloths
- Shelter
- Stability
These needs are basically the requirement for the existence of human life and before a person think about advancing to further levels of the hierarchy they first must fulfill this need.
Level 2 — Safety needs
Once a person successfully overcome psychological as well as physiological needs, he can proceed to next level of the hierarchy where Safety needs dominates the behavior. These needs includes:
- Personal safety
- Emotional safety
- Financial safety
- Health related safety
- Safety from uncontrollable events like accidents/Illness/market crash/war/natural disaster/social or personal issues etc
The safety is crucial for any person to fulfill his basic needs. The physiological and safety needs combined help a person in achieving stability in life. When these two level of needs are achieved, a person can proceed to further levels.
Psychological Needs
Level 3 — Love needs
At this level a person want to feel loved and belonged to a community or family. This is the level that help us in becoming social, because its in our genes, we love being social and enjoy company of others. The examples of this need includes:
- Family
- Friends
- Intimacy
Level 4 — Esteem needs
We all seeks respect, status, recognition and importance from others, and this leads to ego development, which we understand as self esteem. Its natural and most people feel a need to be respected to fuel their self esteem and self respect. The need of esteem is common in humans as it is drives by the desire to be recognized, accepted and valued by others. The examples of this need includes:
- Respect
- Recognition
- Accepted
Self Fulfillment Needs
Level 5 — Self Actualization
People land on this level of need when they attain self realization of their full potential.
Maslow describes this as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be.
A person can understand or even land on this level of needs when he master all the previous levels. The examples of this need includes:
- Pursuing goals
- Partner Acquisition
- Utilizing & Developing Talents & Abilities
- Parenting
So, these were the five levels of need Maslow proposed as a theory. For this research, he selected the top 1% of the people like Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass.
But, today we are going to look at hierarchy of needs from the evolutionary psychology and neurochemical motivational point of view. Now, if we talk about people, they are all different and they all react to situations differently. In general, people tend to avoid any threat to their survival, we call this Loss Aversion. And people like to get survival advantages too, we call these as incentives.
So, in simple words, people love incentives and they purely dislike anything threatening.
Today we are going to look at this framework or theory from the lens of the hierarchy of needs. What we are going to cover is a mixture of the theory of hierarchy of needs and our understanding of marketing based on this theory.
Evolutionary Psychology and Motivation
So, the above picture roughly depicts a model that I learned from a lesson given by Dr. Cugelman. It shows 7 levels of human needs, not like Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs, here everyone can be at one or more levels depending on personal situations.
A person can advance to another level or can skip a level entirely which makes it much flexible and natural. As I said earlier, every person is different so does the situation s/he faces and that is why we can’t hold someone to one level until he matures and master it.
This framework is much easier to understand and implement from marketing perspective. We can leverage this model to better understand our potential customers and we can motivate them to take desired actions.
I am going to briefly explain all of the 7 levels of this framework below from marketing perspective (Please refer to the above picture for better understanding).
Level 1 — Immediate Physiological Needs
At this level people are more concerned about taking care of their physiological needs like body health, hunger, thrust etc. Motivation at this level is not for staying safe and healthy but its a motivation of avoiding threats. According Dr. Cugelman, this level is associated with Cortisol which is a neurotransmitter used by our body for stress response. Dr. Cugelman suggests that one should avoid marketing at this level unless we are trying to market product or service related to Health, Insurance, Community safety, people, danger and related fields.
Level 2 — Self Protection
At this level people are not thinking about avoiding things that can be dangerous but its more about persons feelings. Feeling safe, secure and not threatened. Mostly these feelings are social but it can also be environmental.
At this level people seeks feel of safety and security.
Dr. Cugelman suggest avoiding marketing at this level unless the product or service you are dealing with is related to IT security like antivirus software, products for security of data and backup, Insurance etc.
Level 3 — Affiliation
At this level people want to be part of a community, family or group, so they can feel connections, bonding, even relationships.This level is associated with Oxytocin which is a neurotransmitter which promotes social connections. The negative side of oxytocin is, it might be associated with territorial behavior and jealousy. Dr. Cugelman suggest that when trying to motivate someone at this level, be very careful and aware for backfires that can happen.
Level 4 — Status
At this level of the hierarchy people tend to be motivated for status. We humans do something called as “Social Comparison”, which is how we compare ourselves with others. Serotonin is associated with this level and it is the same neuro chemical associated with many health issues like when people feel powerless, lack of control over their life, etc. Dr. Cugelman suggest that their are potential key backfires that we need to consider while working with motivation at this level.
Level 5 — Mate Acquisition
Functioning of this level is pretty simple and straightforward. Its the human motivation for Intimacy. We want someone to be on our side for everything life throws at us. Mate acquisition or partner finding is a important part of anyone life and its quite open for targeted marketing. Chances of backfires are also low. Make sure you use empathy or compassion when dealing with sever cases.
Level 6 — Mate Retention & Level 7 — Parenting
At this level people desire for love and parenting from an evolutionary point of view. Its all about our greedy genes.
