Does Marketing Create or Satisfy Needs?

Marketing practitioners and researchers define marketing as the concept of fulfilling needs and wants of customers. Quite a number of people consider marketing to be an act of availing necessary information about particular goods and services to consumers. As such, marketing takes into consideration, an act of maintaining a robust knowledge of what wants or needs customers have, products and service designs, as well as different levels of satisfying the needs and wants. With such knowledge, it becomes easy for marketers to present various goods and services to consumers. However, different people have diverse opinions when it comes to marketing. There are those who believe that marketing is all about creating awareness about the existence of certain goods and services. According to others, marketing is more than just an understanding or availing of products and services to consumers. In addition, some people believe that marketing serves in creating wants and needs, which never existed. Yet, others insist that marketing is a process that helps in the satisfaction of existing consumer needs and wants. For this reason, the question is whether marketing plays any role in shaping or reflecting needs and wants of customers.

Considering the two perspectives of whether marketing shapes consumer needs and wants or whether it merely reflects the wants and needs, one would go for the latter. Marketing reflects consumer needs and wants as opposed to shaping them. It offers response to the needs that consumers have as opposed to shaping them. For example, businesses and organizations that follow the marketing concept use such opportunity to establish a gap in the market regarding a particular want or need. After establishing such a need, businesses would find ways of bridging the gap. As such, companies take it their duty to offer a solution in terms of products and services to an existing gap in the market. The primary emphasis of marketing is put on consumers and their needs.

In addition, considering the growth in technology, it is likely that marketers will make use of the internet and other platforms to offer suggestions to consumers regarding available goods and services. Nowadays, consumers have access to a broad range of information provided by marketers via the open platforms brought about by technology. By the use of relational marketing, the probability that marketers will suggest wants and needs to the consumers is very high. In the ancient times, the society suggested needs and wants for consumers. However, with the growth in technology and the adoption of internet and computers, it has become possible for consumers to develop needs and wants through suggestion. The media nowadays exposes so many societal needs and wants, which make it possible for many users to make their decision based on the exposure.

Thus, marketers can increase group thinking and peer pressure on consumers. They do this by displaying goods and services that are available in other parts of the world, or in the possession of other people. Research has showed that the freedom of consumers weakens substantially through a consistent and constant exposure to other persons’ various wants and needs. For this reason, consumers are intrigued to make purchases because other people are in need of the particular goods or services. Evidently, marketing has a way of reflecting consumer needs hence it suffices that marketing creates consumer needs.