Originally published on LinkedIn.
Marketing is the fine art and rigorous science of building up people's desires and then satisfying them with a product. This may not be the most noble way of describing what we do, but it's also not wrong.
Naturally, then, we spend a lot of time thinking about what people want. The academically minded among us tend to talk about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:
Physiological
Safety
Love/belonging
Esteem
Self-actualization
(If you're not familiar with this, the theory says once our physiological needs are met, we move onto safety, and so on and so forth until we have nothing left to pursue but something nebulously called self-actualization.)
At the risk of hubris, I don't think this is a very useful way of thinking about needs and desires. Or at least, I don't think it's the MOST useful way.
Far more useful and simple is a term coined by Renée Girard, and recently popularized by Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg: Mimetic Desire.
Mimetic Desire is the theory that beyond our basic survival needs, all of our desires are just mimicry: I want what I want because I saw you wanting it first.
We want what others want, and when everyone else stops wanting it, so do we.
Said more poetically:
We don’t want; we want to be.
Why can we simultaneously hate Instagram Influencers and still be influenced by them? Because they exemplify the things we think other people want. When 100,000 people like a picture of a fancy young person on a boat, we want to be that fancy young person on a boat. So we buy products to make ourselves look younger and fancier and we buy boats (or rent them or befriend people who have them).
A more self-evident example: Why can we be all about those low-rise jeans one year, and then universally find them to be ugly the next, only to desire them again a few years later? Why were we so embarrassed by the 80s, only to end up replicating them decades later?
I didn't want it until I saw you wanting it.
Actionable take-away?
Don't sell me on the product.
Don't even sell me on the features and benefits.
Sell me on myself. Lift up a mirror to reveal the person I dream of becoming.
Show me what I didn't know I wanted until I you showed me others wanting it