Consumed by Our Wants: The Hierarchy of Needs Makes a Comeback

Abe Maslow is probably turning over in his grave. The creator of psychology's most popularized theory of human motivation (the Hierarchy of Needs) would be shocked to realize that we've become utterly confused by the difference between wants and needs. During the four decades since Maslow passed away, modern man has begun to redefine his need as an unsatisfied 48-hour-old want (thanks to George Will for that thought). Will suggests that this confusing of wants and needs leads to a "tyranny of the unnecessary." Author Gregg Easterbrook suggests, "The blurring of needs and wants is important because needs can be satisfied. A person needs food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and transportation; once attained, these needs are fulfilled. Wants, by contrast, can never be satisfied. The more you want, the more likely you are to feel disgruntled; the more you acquire, the more likely you are to feel controlled by your own possessions."

This quandary of affluence is at the root of why our modern society can become more prosperous, yet still be "wanting." Wants tend to be truly personal and individualistic, while needs are more universal to man. Most observers seem to suggest that needs are sort of basic and wants are the icing on the cake. It is clear that some of today's most successful companies are those satisfying basic needs (McDonald's, Wal-Mart). But, my sense is that needs are more fundamental to who we are as humans. They're not just the boring basics of life that we do before we move on to the exciting and aspirational wants. As Maslow suggested, we all have physiological needs at the base of our Hierarchy of Needs pyramid and once those are partially met, we move up to safety, social-belonging, and our esteem needs with self-actualization (best defined, ironically, by the U.S. Army ad: "be all that you can be") being our predominant need once those lower needs have been met. When someone experiences self-actualization, they realize why they were put on this earth, whether that peak experience comes from being a giving grandmother, a passionate political activist, or an engaged entrepreneur.

But, during the hyper-consumer era that seems to have just passed, we became a society more defined by our Hierarchy of Wants. We became possessed by acquiring possessions, consumed by being consumers, and, yet, the hangover we're feeling today isn't due to just the lack of funds in our bank account. It's also a function of feasting on cotton candy for too long. I remember one day as a child at the carnival, I overindulged eating three pink afros of spun sugar only to spin out in tantrums the rest of the afternoon. This isn't a far cry from the emotional rollercoaster that we've been on. In search of our personal wants, we gorged thinking it would make us gorgeous only to realize that some of our fundamental needs weren't even being met. Credit pushers made it easy to fill our shopping carts with Hummers, timeshares, and flat screen TV's in the laundry room, but our primary purpose for going to the carnival wasn't to eat cotton candy. It was to experience the social interaction of a great afternoon with the family. Somehow we lost sight of what is truly important and universal in our lives.

If you believe that happiness is truly more about wanting what you have as opposed to having what you want, you realize that one of our most fundamental needs as humans is to feel and express gratitude. Maslow suggested, "Gratitude is an extremely important but badly ignored aspect of emotional and organizational health." Gratification is the result of satisfying your wants, but gratitude comes from appreciating that your needs are being met. Today's successful companies will understand that their customers are no longer consumers. They are people looking to have their higher needs met and who will feel deep gratitude when that company taps into an unrecognized higher need that the customer may not have even imagined they were looking for.

If you're a businessperson and you're baffled by this, draw a pyramid with Maslow's five levels of his Hierarchy of Needs (underlined above). Ask yourself, how are you delivering on your customers' various needs in such a fashion that they feel grateful to you for the experience you've delivered? We did this with our customers and were profoundly impacted by imagining what would make a self-actualized hotel guest at one of our 38 boutique hotels. There's no doubt that some of America's most successful companies -- whether it's Apple or Netflix -- have closely analyzed how they move their customers up this pyramid such that their most evangelical cheerleaders feel a sense of being self-actualized just by coming into contact with the company. As a recent Harvard Business Review article suggested, "The aim of Management 2.0 is to make very organization as genuinely human as the people who work (or shop -- my addition) there."

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Chip Conley is an author and hotelier. He is the author of several business books including: The Rebel Rules: Daring to be Yourself in Business (Simon & Schuster, 2001), Marketing that Matters: 10 Practices to Profit Your Business and Change the World (co-authored with Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006), and his most recent book, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow (Jossey-Bass, 2007).