Personal Blogs

Marketing

What is the difference between need and motive?

Henry Murray (1893 – 1988) was the originator of the motive approach to personality. In the 1930’s he differentiated between two types of need; primary and secondary. Primary needs, he proposed, are biological needs such as the need for food, water and sex. Secondary needs, or psychogenic needs, he accorded, are needs derived from our biological needs, like the need for power and achievement. Later, in 1943, Abraham Maslow set out an hierarchy of needs following along from Murray’s work.

Motive theorists propose that needs don’t operate on their own to influence behaviour. Motives, they say, are thoughts and feelings that drive someone to enact certain behaviour to satiate their needs. To elucidate slightly on this: whereas someone may have a biological need for food, it is the subjective feeling of hunger that drives the action to eat or seek food. Theorists also believe that there is a third influence, external conditions, which they, and Murray, call ‘Press’, which contributes to someone’s actions to satiate a need. Such a press in the case of the need for food which is signified by the feeling of hunger could be the smell of food; this could come from a meal being cooked by someone else in the kitchen at home.

Theorists also propose that people do not always openly show their motives but may however project them onto something else. It is this area that marketers need to focus most acutely on to accurately target chosen segments. Not only do people mask their motives they also have individual differences in specific needs, such as power, achievement and affiliation. One only has to give a rudimentary glance at social media to be able to recognise the need for affiliation (forming groups and making friends) and the need for power (social influence and prestige), and, with further research, realise that there is indeed a difference in the extent to which people feel these needs – easily recognised in the absence of many people from expressing opinion on social media sites.

Essentially, then, there is a biological need (something that all people have) and a psychogenic need (differing degrees of relevance in each person) and a subjective feeling or motive which together cause an action to be initated in order to satiate the biological need or psychogenic need. The subjective motive is coloured by preferences which historically, for the individual, have proved to be useful in assuaging a feeling of loss, inadequacy, or lack of achievement, in other words – assuaging a need, both biological and psychogenic.¹

In conclusion, a need is universal throughout all humans and is so fundamental in humans that it has no preferences, and a motive is entirely subjective, is shaped by past experience, and may discriminate against other means of satisfying a need.

What are the basic assumptions in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory rests on the following assumptions: He assumes that a person’s behaviour is derived from his or her own needs; that there is a series of sets of needs that need to be satisfied; that an already satisfied need does not motivate the person to seek further assuaging of that need; that the next need in the series, or another need in the set, will cause a person to be active towards assuaging that need; and that a person cannot move from one set in the series to a higher one until all the needs in the set have been satisfied.

An alternative approach, preferred by some, to understanding the assumptions in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is to distill his research down into TWO assumptions:

1) Humans are a species that experience needs that pertain to what they already have. This is incorrect as needs are not recognised by the individual until a subjective feeling of inadequacy is experienced. The assumption continues thus: A fulfilled need is not a motivator. Since there is a difference between needs and motivators this statement is only partially correct – we need to remove the word ‘fulfilled’ from the statement - a need is never a motivator, fulfilled or otherwise, because a motivator is a stimulus that gives a recognition of a need or want, also a need is never a ‘want’ yet may be perceived to be by an individual.

This assumptions continues: Behaviour can only be influenced by needs which have not already been satisfied. This is at best simplistic and incorrect because behaviour is influenced by various motivators and needs. For example, an inadequacy of food in a human will not influence any behaviour; it will however be recognised by the nervous system and, in a reasoning human, a motivating feeling will occur, which sets up a process of organised thoughts with a focus on satiating a hunger, however, not always healthily. The last part here is that the need for food may not be adequately satisfied whereas the feeling of hunger can be.

2) Maslow proposed that all needs can be ranked as being more, or less, important than another and placed them in sets of needs. He believed that all reasoning humans are compelled to always strive, and move, towards a greater goal from the most basic biological needs to a higher brain function psychological need, such as self-actualisation. Not only that, but also the higher brain function needs cannot be satisfied until the most fundamental ones are satiated. Yet we are aware of starving artists in the garrets of buildings who have satisfied a need to be creative while not satisfying an innate need for food – indeed starving people in very low socio-economic areas, such as can be found on the African and Asian continents, will create very fine pieces of art, furniture, and other items in order to sell them, solely to be able to buy food, and will create such finery even when almost starving because they have no alternative to accruing sufficient money from other means of action.

It should be noted that ‘functional Magnetic Resolution Imaging’ (fMRI) has given rise to Neuro-marketing, the use of neuro-technology to improve marketing decision making. From this research it is understood that the brain activity for an action takes place about half a second before a person consciously decides to take an action. This suggests that we are not consciously making a decision so much as becoming aware that a decision has been made. ²