NEEDS AND WANTS FROM GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA

MARKETING

NEEDS AND WANTS FROM GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Prepared by:

Azlan Bin Mohamad                           2010255048

Abdul Rasyid Bin Salim                       2010206626

Khairul Azelan Bin Kapli                      2010805062

Faridwajdi Bin Mohd Noh                   2010212748

Lecturer:

Prof Madya Haji Hamdan Bin Haji Hassan

Introduction

Needs are the basic human requirements. People need food, air, water, clothing, and shelter to survive. People also have strong needs for creation, education, and entertainment. Human needs are states of felt deprivation.. The extended form of needs are health and education which for sure every on basic need in today’s world but they come after food,cloths and shelter. Marketers play no role in creating needs, they are natural default requirements of every human being. Organization already knows the needs there is no requirement for any research work to develop product which covers the needs of human beings.

The above needs become wants when they are directed to specific objects that might satisfy the need. Wants are shaped by one's society. Wants are the form human needs take as they are shaped by culture and individual personality. Wants are marketed by marketers in such a way that everyone feel these wants should be mandatory part of life. We can take the examples of telephone, Internet, different variety of foods and clothing these all come under umbrella of human wants.

But there is a vital distinction. Needs tend to be more objective requirements while wants are more emotional.

Example:

• I want sweets but I need vitamins.
• I need to be a great presenter because I want a lot more money.
• Any person can eat food to feed himself, but he want to eat fast food, fried rice and Chinese food. Cloths are required for a person to cover himself but we can see people wearing jeans, suit just because of culture influence.

Dominance of wants over needs. As the society progresses on Maslow's hierarchy from physiological and safety-security needs to love, affection, and self-esteem needs, psychological wants will come to dominate the consumer motivations over the physiological needs. It is no exaggeration to state that as an affluent nation, America is a want-driven rather than a need-driven society.

Needs and Wants In Global Perspective

The technology can be located in virtually any geographic area. It requires much less dependence on such natural resources as water, air, and energy. All it needs is skilled labor and supply of man-made resources. Therefore, it is a worldwide technology rather than being limited to those geographical areas that have unique natural resources. This also means that a company must take a global perspective with respect to manufacturing and distribution of its products and services.

The demand-oriented demographic changes and the supply-oriented technological changes in consumer marketing are so dramatic that they must be called megatrends. Furthermore, these megatrends in consumer marketing are highly universal in their impact on diverse consumer products, companies, and industries. Finally, these megatrends are likely to persist well into the twenty-first century.

It will become increasingly difficult for some companies to survive and grow as the consumer markets shift from need-driven to want-driven markets, for several reasons. First, products acquire want-driven utilities through their associations with socioeconomic and other reference groups or with imageries and personalities, rather than through their inherent functional benefits. Therefore, wants are harder to engineer in products and services. Indeed, it is precisely this shift from a need-driven to a want-driven society that is largely responsible for the failure of technologically driven products and market programs. Therefore, more and more what will be required will be an understanding of the psychology of the markets rather than of the physiology of markets.

Second, people are likely to be more divergent on what they want than on what they need. It will therefore become increasingly difficult to mass market want-driven products and services. Will have to be learned in place of product specialization and mass marketing. Indeed, it will become necessary to utilize pull strategies in place of push strategies in marketing.

Finally, wants are more dynamic and volatile than needs. Whereas needs are fairly stable and consistent over longer time periods, wants tend to rise and subside much faster. This fact suggests that consumer marketing will manifest shorter and shorter product, image, and competitive positioning life cycles. Indeed, it means that consumer marketing companies will have to plan major technological and marketing innovations with shorter payback periods.

Pluralism in our values, lifestyles, and behavior is likely to increase because of greater tolerance for individualism and personalized consumption. Furthermore, the electronics age permits marketers to cater profitably to smaller and smaller market segments. Therefore, it can be expected that the next two decades will see increasing desire not to assimilate unique market segments into the mainstream mass markets but to cater to their needs and wants as specialty segments. These include ethnic groups such as blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, and Asians as well as more traditional European ethnic groups. These people all have unique needs and wants either due to biogenic needs or due to unique settings in which they live or work.

No single marketing approach is likely to be sufficient in the future, simply because markets are becoming more and more divergent with respect to wants, needs, and buying power. Therefore, a single way of doing business is unlikely to appeal to all market segments.

In particular, per capita consumption is likely to grow for consumer durables, professional and personal services, packaged foods industries, and leisure. For example, the concept of a family car is likely to give way to a personal car. Therefore, the demand for station wagons should decline and demand for personal cars should increase over time. In other words, the issue facing the automobile industry is not just the size of the automobile but also the type of the car demanded by the market place. Similarly, cameras, radios, television sets, and other brown goods are also likely to become per capita products.

Conclusion

Understanding people’s needs and wants is not always simple. Some peoples have needs of which they are not fully conscious, or they cannot articulate these needs, or they use words that require some interpretation. If you happen to market a mature product that is a need, you are likely closer to a commodity. The best path is to convert a need into a want so that you can appeal to the individual’s emotional desires. Together, wants and needs help set each of us in a direction. They help us understand what the customer values most. Collectively, they form the context into which we must insert our marketing messages. In practice it is impossible to draw the line at which absolute needs are met. Different measures have been produced at different times to define minimum levels of well-being below which people can be said to be living in poverty. Such measures produce an absolute standard which can be called the 'poverty line'.