Marketing Creates Consumer Needs or Whether it

¶ … marketing creates consumer needs or whether it just satisfies those needs. As frequently happens with debates, there is some merit to both points-of-view.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large" (AMA, 2011). Clearly the AMA holds that creating offerings that have value for customers is a legitimate marketing activity. This paper argues that the question of whether marketing convinces customers to develop new desires or whether it simply identifies and responds to pre-existing needs can be answered by how one defines what the customer considers to be of value.

Every individual has basic needs, which no amount of marketing can create. Most people would agree that the need for food, clothing, shelter etc. all fall into the category of needs that marketing does not create; rather these needs exist at the basic, fundamental human level. On the other hand, marketing has a great deal of influence over not whether these needs are satisfied or not, but how they are satisfied. One can satisfy one's need for a meal in various ways that marketing attempts to influence, from eating a power bar endorsed by a professional athlete to dining out at a trendy restaurant endorsed by a celebrity. The message that marketing delivers suggests that eating the power bar will improve one's athletic ability, and similarly that dining where celebrities eat suggests that one can enjoy a glamorous lifestyle similar to a celebrity's.

Where does the need or desire to be a better athlete or live like a celebrity originate? With a marketing campaign or from deep within the human psyche? Some would argue that these needs and wants originate within us, and that marketing does nothing more than make us aware of a need we didn't know we had. Others argue that, at the very least, marketing creates peer pressure to aspire to questionable goals. And both arguments are correct. For consumers who are not swayed by celebrity endorsements or flashy commercials for example, there is an explanation for their behavior: such products or services do not provide what the consumer perceives as valuable.

Papadakis (2008) draws a similar distinction in his article. He argues that real human needs are satisfied by a product's use-value, whereas artificial needs are satisfied by a product's symbolic value. Although he does not directly credit or blame marketing for need creation, he makes it clear that the underlying distinction regarding what consumers value gives rise to product differentiation. In other words, consumers define value according to what they want (Papadakis, 2008). What marketing creates is not needs but the perception of value.

Marketers do use consumer needs to create demand for a product or service. Marketers who understand the criteria that consumers use to make buying decisions use their knowledge of consumer behavior to formulate their marketing plans. These plans are then intended to help a business' product or service be the one that consumers choose (Agadoni, 2011).