Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

This is a follow-up on my previous post about You Not Being The Hero.

Do you remember the Pyramid (or Hierarchy) of the Needs of Humans? It is taught in most high-schools or schools in the world and explains the needs that make us humans run and live our lives.

It is the driving force behind a lot of primitive needs, but surprisingly enough it also explains a lot of what happens in the commercial world, the marketing world.

Understanding the pyramid of human needs is essential to understand what will make a customer click your Call-To-Action or your Google searcher to click into your site.

This same pyramid is also essential for actually keeping the reader of your article for longer than 1 second on your site.

Understanding Maslov's Pyramid

The first layer of the pyramid is about having food and drinks, the primal need to survive. In the modern world this is all already sorted and easily available, but we can translate this need into the need for a job and a dependable income.

The second layer is about a shelter or a roof over our head. That one is self-explanatory. Most of us have that one perfectly sorted as well.

The third layer is about tribe building. Relationships, romantically, sexually and friends are important. It is the type of tribe we can fall back and help us out, when the barbarians come down the hill to clobber us.

The fourth layer is about status and recognition.

The fifth layer about finding a deeper meaning through intellectual and spiritual means.

Importance Of Human Needs

Perhaps this sounds all like a nice bunch of information from the old history or biology books, but I will show you that this is going to make sense too in the customer-buying-cycle part of marketing.

"Humans look constantly for information that is going to help them meet their primitive need to survive"

This means that when we talk on our website about how we got a fantastic big building where all our 354 employees are having their own office, got a manufacturing plant on the West Coast or tell the customer that we got the best product on the market, our customers don’t care.

Why? Because that information isn’t helping them eat, drink, find a mate, fall in love, build a tribe, experience a deeper sense of meaning, or stockpile weapons in case another tribe comes running down the hill with weapons equipped.

All that information that customers don't understand or meets their needs, is simply noise. It will be ignored by them.

Our brains (and that of customers) are constantly filtering through and categorizing the information we take in. Information comes to our brains in many ways, we read, we feel, we sense, we see etc.

It is impossible to pay attention to everything and so we discard millions of unnecessary facts every day.

Just think about it, when you enter a new room, say a theater. We will almost immediatly scan the area and find the exits. Our brains could take in the amount of chairs in the theater or the lights pointed at the stage, but this isn't important. The quickest way out in case of a fire is way more important piece of information to our brain.

"The brain’s primary job is to help us survive and thrive"

Processing all this information also burns a lot of calories. Burning too many calories acts against the brain’s primary job: "to help us survive and thrive.”

When a customer needs to burn too many calories to understand your message, they will generally start to ignore your information to preserve energy.

If we don’t say something (quickly) that they can use to survive or thrive, they will tune us out.

In the next post more info on how to do this best.

Please tell me if this made sense to you in the comments section below.