Excerpts from Chapter 5 of "Digital Disruption"

 

 

Chapter 5

Digital Consumers Want to Fulfill Their Needs

Digital consumers are not a new type of animal. But as digitally empowered creatures, they are equipped with more ways to meet their fundamental needs more rapidly than ever before. The only way to keep up with them is to meet them on their terms, to serve those fundamental needs more fully than before. But what are their fundamental needs? It turns out that Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is a poor guide. I propose a new model of fundamental human needs.¹ To become a digital disruptor, you have to become obsessed with finding more ways to meet more consumer needs more quickly than before.

When people adopt technology, they do old things in new ways. When people internalize technology, they find new things to do.

They wouldn’t just use digital technology to improve on old things. They would—powered by technology—be open to entirely new experiences. And those experiences, when unleashed, would force everything else to change.

If digital consumers are enhanced humans, then keeping up with their digital power will require, first, understanding why humans do what they do in the first place. Then we will be able to project just how differently they will behave once they are digitally enabled.

If I were to ask you why people behave the way they do, you might be tempted to construct a reply based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That would make sense because it’s what you were taught in Psych 101 and everybody else believes it, too. So get ready, because I am going to eviscerate Maslow’s hierarchy. I know you didn’t pick up this book to learn more about fundamental human psychology, but we have to go there now, because it matters in your business planning. If you move forward in any aspect of your business planning while still retaining the misleading understanding of human psychology suggested by Maslow’s hierarchy, you will fail to anticipate the rapidly growing expectations of your customers.

Abraham Maslow developed his famous hierarchy in 1943 by studying people he felt were exemplary, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, as well as college students at elite institutions. His goal was laudable. He thought that by looking closely at the people who were at the pinnacle of the social order he could help everyone else emulate them and thus avoid the follies of the lower classes. Thanks to his study of elite individuals, Maslow proposed his famous explanation for how our needs motivate us. Some of the things he concluded are true, most are not.

Maslow’s most enduring contribution to the study of human needs—and the only one that I won’t refute—is that human needs are shared by the entire race, regardless of one’s location on the map, in history, or in the landscape of human culture. Whether you realize it or not, all product development is done under the assumption that needs are general; if they weren’t, how could you design something like mobile speakers without faith that the needs of the people you interact with will be common to many other consumers?

But Maslow moved from his idea of universal needs to the claim that our shared needs are hierarchical. Maslow did not include a pyramid in his original study, but the pyramid later came to embody Maslow’s philosophy. Basically, in Maslow’s view, we all start at the bottom of the pyramid, fulfilling basic physiological needs, and only progress to satisfying higher-order needs once we have a stable source for fulfilling lower-order needs (seeFigure 5-1).4 Thus, adapting Maslow, psychiatrists and self-help gurus talk about how we are likely to “revert” to lower levels of need when we are frustrated with our inability to fulfill higher-order needs.

Figure 5-1: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

At the top of his pyramid, Maslow placed his most untenable claim, that self-actualization is a need. This one clearly comes from the sample that Maslow studied—remember, these are Yale and Harvard grads—leading him to the elitist claim that only people who have climbed his ladder can achieve the peaceful state of self-actualization. Product marketers often tie their products to this mythical state—Audi once pitched its A8 as embodying “the art of perfection.” Misled by Maslow, the Audi ad crew imagined that a vehicle that attains the pinnacle of the principles of design and engineering is obviously the ideal companion for a self-actualized individual.

However, in the 1980s a Chilean academic, Manfred Max-Neef, finally challenged the Maslow fan club. While he accepted Maslow’s assertion that humans share a common set of fundamental needs, he went on to explain that our needs are nowhere near as orderly as Maslow suggested.⁵ A moment of honest introspection will reveal that this is true: that your fundamental needs are at odds with each other, each vying for priority depending on a complex mix of how long it has been since each has been fulfilled and what your current opportunity for need fulfillment is. In fact, brain science now shows that there is no central authority in the brain making executive decisions.⁶ As a result, people don’t behave in rational and ordered ways. Instead, the multiple paths that the brain employs to manage multiple inputs and direct multiple outputs compete with one other, ensuring that the few rational priorities people possess shift continuously.

The brain is governed by regionalized functions that act independently of one another. Thanks to technologies like functional MRI, scientists have learned that the brain processes its vast array of inputs in multiple, overlapping systems that behave according to their own rules of regulation, often without consulting one another. Furthermore, the body can play an active role in brain function by delivering hormones that alter the way regions of the brain perform their functions. This interplay leads us to perceive ourselves as subject to various whims and changes of mood.

So forget Maslow’s pyramid, since it doesn’t help us to understand how digital consumers behave or how to harness their power. To see what this means in practice, visit a Best Buy and watch a tech geek stand torn between the PCs, the game consoles, and the connected TVs in a smorgasbord of competitive need fulfillment.

Because needs compete, they have a tendency to manifest themselves urgently in response to circumstances—either threats or opportunities. For example, a married man attending a large convention in Las Vegas may feel satisfied by the long-distance companionship of his wife miles away until an attractive alternative appears next to him at the blackjack table. A savvy, artistic twentysomething who idolizes the iPad may find herself compelled to get a Kindle Fire because it helps her manage her budget more effectively while still delivering many of the values she would derive from the iPad. Because the way we experience our needs is determined by both conscious and subconscious processes, humans are no better at predicting which needs they will most want to fulfill in the future than they are at predicting the weather a week out.

Figure 5-2: The Four Fundamental Human Needs

We need an alternative model. This is what I call the four fundamental human needs model (see Figure 5-2) and it meets stringent criteria that prior thinkers were able to ignore. It accounts for what we know about human physiology and explains how human needs affect individual behaviors, but it’s still simple enough to guide digital disruptors to a better product strategy.

Need No. 1: Comfort 

The most basic human need is the need for comfort. The word “comfort” encompasses many experiences and states of being, includingreassurance, serenity, security, and safety. This need is characterized by a desire to remove stress and reduce complexity. The need for comfort operates mostly at a subconscious level, serving to generate short-term feelings of well-being that reduce anxiety.

Comfort asserts itself in response to threats to well-being. The human brain is designed to deal with two types of conditions: threat and opportunity. Threats are primary—the brain sets several regions on autopilot, looking for anything that might harm us. In response to threat signals, these regions flood the brain and body with unpleasant levels of hormones such as adrenaline or cortisol, encouraging the conscious mind to find a solution to the present problem, thus reducing the unpleasant hormones and restoring a state of comfort.

Comfort is the easiest of our four needs to justify biologically. It arises directly from the release and uptake of neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and serotonin, hormones that provide feelings of well-being and security. It should be easy to see how comfort has always played a role in consumer products and marketing. Consider the most successful marketing campaigns in history and you’ll immediately recognize the role of comfort in building successful products and brands. From buying the world a Coke to the “Mmm Mmm Good” deliciousness of Campbell’s soup, selling comfort always yields significant returns.

Need No. 2: Connection

Comfort is so fundamental a need that it spawns a sister need: a conscious desire to connect to other people for the mutual safety and security that such connections provide. Connection can be achieved on multiple levels and through a variety of interpersonal mechanisms, such as touch, conversation, shared experiences—and this is also where we explain the otherwise baffling success of FarmVille. Connection is as wired into us as our awareness of our own mortality. In fact, there is an entire academic theory, terror management theory, devoted to demonstrating that when we are primed with an awareness of our own mortality, we respond by affirming our social connections more deeply than we would otherwise.7 This means that we’ll feel more patriotic, affirm community religious and moral standards, and even judge outsiders more harshly, all as a defense against threats. Our bonds to other people—though conscious aspects of our personal experience—are motivated at a very deep, biological level.

Here again, connection sells products and services. Whether it’s when a trusted celebrity hawks a brand of soda or when Facebook promises us that we can friend the world, our response is the same. We sign up to follow somebody on Twitter because we perceive that our need for connection will be met—a connection to people we already care about or to those celebrities or public figures with whom we have a one-way, parasocial relationship.

Need No. 3: Variety 

While comfort and connection serve to prepare us to cope with threats to our safety and well-being, the human organism must also be prepared to seek opportunities for expansion and growth. Variety is the first of two needs that prepare us for opportunities. It is characterized by feelings of excitement and possibility, the anticipation of novelty and diversion, and positive uncertainty. Like comfort, variety operates primarily at a subconscious level, serving to stimulate the body and mind to consider new behaviors and to engage in situations that may yield positive returns for the individual.

Variety manifests itself in response to crushing sameness. Any parent who has listened to children complain that they are bored, bored, bored after only a week of summer vacation will recognize this need for stimuli that is native to the human animal. When neurological inputs repeat themselves or sustain themselves without interruption, the brain pays decreasing attention to them until they are no longer noticed or grow wearisome. That’s why a back scratch eventually stops feeling good or why we can watch most movies just once—or why a teenager can listen to a new Lady Gaga song obsessively for a week and then suddenly drop it like last week’s stale bread. When our minds know what’s coming, they generate less enthusiasm for it, preferring instead the unexpected.

This need is moderated by chemicals like dopamine and epinephrine. One success factor in long-lasting marriages, for example, is that these couples engage in novel behaviors—visiting new restaurants or traveling to new destinations together.⁸ This triggers the release of dopamine in the couple’s brains, stimulating their need for variety while reinforcing the feelings of connection and romance that they feel for one another. The chemicals released when encountering new and varied experiences are so vital to healthy functioning that a body isolated in a sensory deprivation chamber for extended periods will actually generate false external experiences—in other words, hallucinations—in order to supply the brain with needed stimuli.

Variety also drives billions in consumer purchases. We need look no further than Mountain Dew, the cult of personality surrounding skateboarder Tony Hawk, or the glory days of MTV to understand how the desire for variety and novelty can be successfully fulfilled for commercial purposes. It’s not just youth who desire change, however. The ubiquitous “new and improved” labels found on the latest incarnations of Tide and Crest demonstrate that the variety supplied by changing stimuli targets a clear need that consumers have, even if that need hovers mostly below the limits of consciousness.

Need No. 4: Uniqueness

Even though people want to connect to other human beings, they also want to feel unique and special in the world. Uniqueness serves as the conscious expression of a lower-level desire to prepare for possible opportunities and improvements in one’s situation. A sense of uniqueness allows us to have optimistic expectations about our own chances when such opportunities arise, even when others around us struggle.

Uniqueness is a form of self-identification that confers benefits. Anyone who has survived high school knows that while having friends isimportant, having the right friends is even better. That’s why people will go to great lengths to separate themselves from the masses through their choice of hobbies, favorite music, preferred blogs, and hair and clothing styles.

This need can motivate consumers to pay a premium. The desire to distinguish oneself from the herd is strong enough that people will pay extra for it. The truly wealthy will obviously spring for a Mercedes-Benz or a Porsche, but even someone with less cash may still desire a flashy car—often “modding” or “pimping’” it to signal his unique identity. Much of our research into technology adoption has demonstrated that status plays a role in buying things like large-screen TVs or the latest smartphones.

By now, it’s clear that human needs are neither simple nor straightforward. Yet we can summarize such complexity with just four distinct needs because these four can combine in infinite ways—and in response to local circumstances, they can produce the wide range of feelings, desires, and urges we feel each day. But if these needs are universal and product marketers from every industry have learned how to exploit them, why am I presenting them to you as if they matter more now?

Because they do. These fundamental needs have always been with us, but thanks to rapid consumer digitization, these needs are prominent in a way that was not possible to see before. Just imagine your grandparents, whether they were kids of the Depression or World War II. The range of options and choices they had available to them were smaller by many orders of magnitude than what you have today, whether you consider what they could eat for lunch or how they could communicate across distances or where and when they could find out what the Lone Ranger was up to. This lack of options had a natural dampening effect on their expectations, thus shifting down their brains to anticipate and plan for less fulfillment.

Today brains have shifted into overdrive. Thanks to digital, we have the ability to meet more of our needs more often and to a greater degree than our grandparents, our parents or even ourselves from just ten years ago. In fact, it’s not just the case that digitally empowered consumers can meet more needs, they can meet more needs simultaneously. Buying an iPod a decade ago might have satisfied a few of your needs, but buying an iPad today satisfies many more needs, more deeply, all at once.

I attacked Maslow’s hierarchy because it’s embedded unconsciously in the mindset of most businesspeople. The new needs I have described should now replace Maslow’s as a clear mandate for action in your day-to-day response to digital consumers. Thanks to their embrace of digital experiences, you face intense pressure to meet their fundamental needs more fully than before. Digital disruptors already think this way. Digital disruptors may not have known the names of the needs or the hormones involved in their expression, but they were already able to look at messy, conflicting, urgent human needs and begin to imagine the digital solutions they could create to satisfy multiple needs in one digital stroke. You can think this way, too, by adopting a few specific practices:

First, map product experiences to needs. Identify how your product does or does not meet the four fundamental needs. Pay close attention to the words you use when attempting this. Fun and excitement go under the need of variety, exclusivity fits under uniqueness, and so on. Do this until you’ve described every aspect of your product’s experience and you can list the ways in which you meet each need. You will find that your product leans heavily toward one or two dominant needs and serves the other needs at a lower level, if at all.

Second, analyze how conveniently your product meets needs. For each need you believe you are meeting, rate how conveniently you help people meet that need compared with the nearest alternatives. This comparison is crucial in a digital era because, equipped with the right technology, people are always a click away from another way to meet that same need.

Third, plan to meet more needs more conveniently. Your product may never meet all four needs simultaneously, but you should insistently expand the number of needs you can satisfy, gradually extending into adjacent possibilities, which I’ll describe in chapter 6. This task is significantly easier thanks to digital tools you can use to build digital product experiences that will enhance and expand the very nature of the product itself, as I’ll explain in chapter 7.