Catering to Wants Over Needs
Here is a thought that has been bothering me for a while now and I needed to put something down on “paper” to think about it more:
The most successful influencers, marketers, and content creators give people what they want rather than what they need.
What people need is often boring, difficult, and requires consistent effort that doesn’t provide instant gratification. What people want is exciting, easy to consume, and provides short-term fulfillment.
I see this play out clearly in the stock trading space. Some of the largest trading accounts I observe consistently give predictions and hot takes on future market moves. Providing this type of speculative content is essentially useless for becoming a successful trader or making money in the markets, but it’s exactly what keeps people coming to then. It gets more views, subscribers, and product sales. The account has realized that giving followers what they want “wins out” over giving them what they need in if they want to benefit.
This disparity between wants and needs shows up across many other areas of life. For example, when trying to motivate people to exercise, giving them cool new workout clothes or equipment caters to their wants, but does little to instill the daily discipline and grit that is truly needed.
Another example, reading. There are all the cool speed reading tricks, reading streaks, badges, fancy covers and attention grabbing titles but really, to read more — you need to sit down and read more. But how can you sell that or attract people to your feed with that message? You can’t.
I wonder if it’s because giving people what they need is often impossible so want is as close as you can get? How can an influencer directly instill a habit of showing up every day? The most they can do is provide motivation and inspiration and you resort to these “want” based messaging and actions. People’s wants are much easier to cater to through exciting or novel content and products.
And maybe that’s how it needs to be because providing a need is hard and we all fall to the easy path. Perhaps the message here to myself and others is that when we take something from someone, think if this is truly what you need and it’s not some wishful thinking, want type, idea.
