Advertising to People's "Needs"

Abraham Maslow proposed his theory called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. He believed that there were certain levels of human needs. He believed that most powerful is our physiological needs, which are our biological needs, the need for anything that allows us to live. For example, the need for oxygen, food, water, sleep, excretion, and so on. The second level of need is our safety needs; such as, the security of our health, body, or family. Next are needs for love, affection and belongingness. Humans need to feel love, we need to have social connections that comfort us and are there for us. Needs for esteem is the next level; it’s the human’s need for things like self-esteem, confidence, and respect. Last level is needs for self-actualization, for someone to be who he or she wants to be. So many ads on television are shown to use people’s needs to motivate them into buying whatever they are trying to sell.

KFC uses not only their words in one of their commercials to motivate people to buy their food, but they use MC Hammer. They use wo...