The most basic concept underlying marketing is that of human needs. Human needs are states of felt deprivation. They include basic physical needs for food, clothing, warmth, and safety; social needs for belonging and affection; and individual needs for knowledge and self-expression. These needs are created by marketers; they are a basic part of human markup. In this article, we are going to know about types of marketing needs.

Types of Marketing Needs

Basically, types of marketing needs depend on two aspects which are companies and consumers. These are furnished below:

For the aspects of companies, there are four main types of marketing needs which are briefly given below:

  1. Research and Development: will focus on gathering information and developing strategies, products, plans, etc. – anything that will help you make your business better, innovative, and help it grow. This type of marketing tends to be more inward than outward. Although it will affect the overall outcome involving a business transaction with a customer or another business.
  2. Sales’ Marketing: focuses on delivering results and the main objective is to increase sales, it will look for the best locations, approach, product design, product features, prices, etc. anything to raise the number of sales.
  3. For Branding: the main focus is to make your company and/or your products or services well known to the customers, recognizable, and improve your reputation.
  4. And finally, Virtual and Digital Marketing: aims to apply the marketing techniques to the new technology available.

For the aspects of consumers, there are basically five types of marketing needs:

  1. Stated Needs are the ones that are specified clearly by the customer or the market, as the name suggests, in this case, the consumer explicitly states what he/she wants. Customers also have the expected needs for a particular product or service. These needs are at the most basic level without which the need cannot be qualified. For e.g. I need a phone, a bicycle, food to eat and I feel like having a burger.
  2. Real Needs are at one level above the stated needs and put a boundary on the above. Real needs define the parameters which are immediate to defining and fulfilling the need. So when the consumer wants a phone to remain connected to his/her friends, family, and colleagues, the actual need is a phone with high battery backup and not a high camera resolution.
  3. Unstated Needs are which are not obvious but are expected by the customer. These are the needs that can be used to differentiate the companies while designing the products to fulfill the needs of the customer. The consumer also expects a warranty and other sorts of after-sales service when buying a phone which he/she might not say explicitly.
  4. Delight Needs are the needs that provide the ‘wow’ factor. These needs like unstated needs can make some products more popular than others if they meet these needs. The consumer would like the phone manufacturer or the dealer to give him/her some free gift or a promotional item (phone case, tempered glass, free SIM, etc.), but he/she doesn’t clearly express that he/she wants something with the phone.
  5. Secret Needs – These are the needs that a customer might not state or realize but can be one of the main reasons for choosing a particular product to fulfill the basic stated need; for example, the consumer wants the phone for his/her status symbol but he/she feels uncomfortable to admit that status is important to him/her.

Finally, we can say that marketing needs are the things that customers require when purchasing a product or service. Every business must find out about their customer’s needs in order to be successful. There are four main customer needs that an entrepreneur or business must consider. These are price, quality, choice, and convenience.

References:

  1. Marketing Management 12e- Philip Kotler & Kevin Lane Keller
  2. Marketing Management…… Nobi – Forid – Korim – Mahmud
  3. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/marketing-and-strategy-terms/1916-needs.html
  4. https://www.twelve12.com/blog/marketing/different-types-of-needs-different-types-of-marketing/
  5. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understanding-needs-wants-demands-marketing-world-sumit-saurav/