Marketing isn't about creating needs

I remember a question from one of my first marketing classes: What is marketing? One of the answers that came up was something along the lines of “creating needs so people buy things.” It's a surprisingly common definition. And, to be fair, I understand where it comes from.

We've all seen advertising that plays on insecurities, manufactures urgency, or promises things a product can't possibly deliver. There's an entire side of marketing built around getting people to buy, sometimes regardless of whether they should.

But I've always found that definition rather strange. Because marketing isn't magic. You can't create a need out of thin air.

You can't manufacture hunger

Imagine you're hungry. I show you a photograph of a Snickers bar, with caramel slowly stretching between two pieces of chocolate. Perfect lighting. Beautiful composition. Everything designed to make it look irresistible.

Have I created your hunger? Of course not. I might have made you crave a Snickers. That's different.

And here's the interesting part: what if you don't like Snickers? I could spend a fortune making the most spectacular advertisement imaginable, and you'd probably still scroll past it.

Now imagine I show you a photograph of fresh salmon sushi instead. The texture, the colour, that slightly glossy surface. Suddenly, you're interested.

Same person. Same hunger. Different product.

The difference isn't how persuasive the advertisement is. It's how well what I'm offering connects with what you actually want.

Of course, marketing can influence desire. It can introduce possibilities, shape preferences, build aspirations, and make something feel attractive or meaningful. That's part of what it does. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Not everything we buy needs to solve a practical problem. Beauty, enjoyment, identity, curiosity, and belonging are forms of value too.

The question isn't whether marketing influences people. It obviously does.

The question is what we're influencing them towards, and whether there's something genuinely valuable waiting on the other side.

Marketing is a matching problem

Sometimes I think marketing has more in common with Tinder than we'd like to admit. Not because brands need to flirt with their customers, but because the whole point should be finding a good match.

Something to offer. Someone who might genuinely appreciate it. A connection that makes sense for both.

And, just like dating, trying to appeal to absolutely everyone isn't usually a particularly good strategy.

A product doesn't have to be right for everybody. In fact, it probably isn't. That doesn't make it a bad product.

What matters is understanding who it is right for, why they might choose it, and what makes that choice worthwhile.

Sometimes, that's about solving a specific problem. Sometimes, it's about an experience or a feeling. Sometimes, two products perform almost identically, but one brand represents something people identify with.

That connection can be valuable in itself.

Communication doesn't merely describe value. It can help create it. But there's a difference between building a meaningful identity and using an attractive identity to disguise something that doesn't deliver.

I came back to this later, from another angle, in The marketing of not marketing: helping people find something they might value doesn't always have to lead to a sale.

And sometimes, the problem isn't the communication at all. Sometimes, the product needs to change.

This is where I think marketing becomes much more interesting than simply figuring out how to sell something.

Understanding people, their motivations, frustrations, habits, and expectations can reveal opportunities to improve what a company actually offers.

Maybe the product is aimed at the wrong audience. Maybe a small adjustment would make it substantially more useful. Maybe the company is trying to compete in a category where its real strengths barely matter.

Marketing should be able to inform those decisions, even if the people responsible for it aren't always given a seat at that particular table.

Because if there's no meaningful fit, you have options: rethink the audience, reconsider the positioning, or improve the product.

Trying to persuade someone that a mismatch is a perfect match shouldn't be the default.

When fear becomes a strategy

There's another reason companies sometimes get this wrong, and I don't think it's necessarily dishonesty. I think it's fear. Fear of losing customers. Fear of being too expensive. Fear of watching competitors grow while your business struggles to keep up.

And that fear is understandable. Running a business involves real responsibilities, financial pressure, and decisions without guaranteed outcomes. From the inside, it's not always easy to see things from another perspective.

But fear has a peculiar way of making imitation feel safe.

A competitor launches a discount campaign, so you launch one too. Everyone in your industry starts communicating in the same way, so you follow. Someone tells you your prices are too high, and suddenly the entire strategy revolves around making them lower.

Before long, ten companies are saying practically the same thing, competing for the same customers, using the same arguments. And somehow, they're all still trying to differentiate themselves.

There's nothing inherently wrong with competing on price. Making products more accessible can be a meaningful proposition, and for some businesses, affordability is central to their identity. A supermarket built around low prices has every reason to communicate them.

But a company whose strengths are craftsmanship, specialist knowledge, innovation, or customer experience might be undermining its own positioning by making discounts the centre of every conversation.

Not every brand needs a big red SALE sign. And not every expensive product is overpriced.

Sometimes, a price is genuinely too high for the value offered. Sometimes, the value is there, but poorly communicated. And sometimes, the company is simply speaking to the wrong people.

Those are three very different problems. Treating them all as a reason to lower prices doesn't solve them. Neither does copying whatever seems to be working for somebody else.

The uncomfortable part is that these decisions can become self-reinforcing. The less differentiated a business feels, the more pressure it experiences to compete on price. The more it competes on price, the harder it can become to communicate anything else.

What started as an attempt to protect the business can gradually weaken the very things that made it worth choosing.

The sale is not the whole system

Perhaps the biggest problem with defining marketing as the art of making people buy things is that it treats the purchase as the finish line. But it isn't.

A customer buys. Then they use the product. They form an opinion. They decide whether they would buy again, recommend it, complain about it, or avoid the brand entirely.

All of that matters.

Imagine a campaign that generates hundreds of conversions by making a product sound more capable than it really is. On a dashboard, the results might look excellent.

But what happens when those customers discover that the experience doesn't match what they were promised? What happens to repeat purchases, recommendations, customer support costs, reputation, and trust?

A conversion might be a success for the campaign and a failure for the business.

That's why I find it difficult to separate marketing from the rest of the system.

The product, the positioning, the expectations we create, the experience we deliver, the people we attract, and the relationships we maintain are connected.

Optimising one part while ignoring the consequences elsewhere can produce some very convincing numbers and some very questionable outcomes.

And this is where ethics and strategy start to overlap.

Misleading someone might help secure a transaction. That doesn't mean it creates a sustainable customer relationship.

A good match, on the other hand, doesn't require the customer to discover that the promise was exaggerated. The experience reinforces the reason they chose you in the first place.

Of course, not every good product succeeds, and not every questionable tactic fails. The market isn't that fair or predictable. But looking beyond the initial sale changes the questions we ask.

Instead of simply asking How do we get more people to buy this?, we might start asking:

Who is this actually for? Why would they choose it? What happens after they do? And could we make that experience better?

Those questions are less spectacular than the promise of creating needs out of nowhere. They're also much more useful.

Maybe we've been asking the wrong question

I don't think marketing needs to abandon persuasion, emotion, or creativity to become more thoughtful. It doesn't have to be purely rational, either. People aren't rational all the time, and that's fine.

Nor am I suggesting that every purchase should be necessary, every brand should serve a higher purpose, or every campaign should be a philosophical exercise. Sometimes people just want sushi.

But I do think there's a meaningful difference between helping someone discover something they'll genuinely appreciate and convincing them to buy something they'll regret. Between understanding an audience and exploiting its insecurities. Between building a brand people connect with and making promises the experience cannot sustain. And between chasing the next conversion and building something people might actually want to come back to.

Maybe marketing isn't about making everyone want what you're selling.

Maybe it's about making what you offer worth wanting, understanding who might value it, and helping the two find each other.

Less magic. More meaningful matches.