What Is A Need?

Jan 6, 2009 by Mark Maier

"Ted Levitt, the late Harvard B-School marketing guru, famously wrote, "People don't buy products. They buy solutions to problems." For Levitt, this notion is fundamental. As he saw it, and as generations of business people have recognized, thanks to him, identifying problems and solving them is the essence of what business is all about. In other words, the only path to success is properly understanding and delivering what customers need.

Levitt's insight endures as a keystone idea in marketing. Yet, for all of its genius, this notion overlooks something elemental. Levitt's imperative to identify needs and satisfy them begs a more basic question: What is a need?"

The above 2 paragraphs are from MediaPost's "Productivity: Enough Of Too Much" article from J. Walker Smith and in todays marketplace, the question of what constitutes a need is more valid than ever.  It is pretty easy to sit down with a client during a Customer Marketing Profile and ask a series of questions to get at the "needs" that the client has and some insight into how we might solve them.  Be prepared to do mystery shopping in client businesses, talk with other customers and get feedback or actually do business exit surveys and ask the most important questions that will give your client the information they need.  Right now our clients are asking the really tough question about consumers: "What is a need for the consumer and how do I fulfill it since they don't have as much disposable income ?"....

"The current generation of marketers is experienced in marketing to consumers who want more, but not in marketing to consumers who want less. New needs will have to be discovered. New solutions will have to be mastered and delivered. This is not to suggest that market opportunities are going to shrivel up and blow away. Instead, the biggest growth opportunities of tomorrow will be those that address the needs of consumers who are overwhelmed by super-abundance, not to mention suddenly unable to afford more and more of it. It means thinking about how to give consumers less in ways that deliver more value to their lives. That's what consumers will be willing, and able, to pay for."

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