In the last two chapters, you saw how you’ll get nowhere with your business if you offer karaoke to introverts or genealogy to teens. You have to match your digital ads and apps to our personalities and life stages or you won’t survive the bottlenecks of disposition. Sure, you could instead shotgun out your work to the population as a whole, but it is guaranteed that in doing so you’ll waste more time and money than competitors that engage in better disposition matching.

Targeting our life-stage questions and personalities is easy since they change very slowly or not at all. But our needsshift the moment they are satisfied. Despite this volatility across time and situations, it is no less important for you to match them too. If you try to offer “cool selfie after-effects” to someone who is worried about paying the rent at that moment, you’ll understand what we mean.

How do you identify what needs your work fulfills for your users? You’ll need to use some big-data modeling techniques. Hire a market research analyst that offers psychographic segmentationand here’s what they will do for you.

The analyst will start by asking you to list every single action and value proposition that your users might perform or achieve while using your product. A fully-functional social media web site with content, searching, profile formation, and sharing tools might easily have a list of 150 statements or more, each ideally starting with an active verb like “edit my profile photo,” “post comments,” “rate comments,” etc. To this list you can add some more abstract, higher-level needs like “promote my business,” “connect with people,” or “organize my life.” While you’re at it, throw in 10 statements covering our personality tendencies and another eight representing our life-stage questions.

When you’re done preparing this list, the analyst will have you field a survey to about 1,500 of your users (a good ratio is about 10 respondents per statement), asking us to simply rate on a five-point scale how much or little we need or want to perform every one of those actions or realize every one of those value propositions. Choose carefully whom you field this survey to: your premium-paying users might have a different profile of needs than your non-paying users or your prospective users. You may need to separately survey all of these groups.

The analyst will then retire into their statistical laboratory (with a mad-scientist laugh) and perform two modeling steps: factor analysiswill look for groups of similar needs out of the original batch of 150, and cluster analysis will look for groups of similar people when it comes to those needs. The analyst isn’t going to do this with sticky notes and subjective opinions, oh no. Instead they’ll use statistical techniques that let the data tell them the basic “hooks” of your product and the “segments” of like-minded users you have.

But before you spend the money to do this (it ain’t cheap), you should start with a prediction of what it might reveal. Despite the ultra-modern question “what psychographic needs are fulfilled by my digital meme?”the most likely answer was already known in 1943 by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow was the intellectual nephew of Sigmund Freud (Maslow’s mentor was Freud’s contemporary Alfred Adler, a psychological giant himself) and thus his methods were more humanistic than statistical. That is to say he observed closely and thought deeply rather than collected data and analyzed it. But Maslow also had an intimate understanding of the great range of human needs as the son of Jewish refugees who fled the persecution of czarist Russia only to raise Maslow in poverty in New York. From this background, Maslow came to believe in a hierarchy of needs(Figure 13-1) that can be summarized as follows:

Figure 13-1. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. ⁱ

Only after we satisfy our…

• physiological needs (food, drink, temperature, sleep), do we turn to our

• security needs (of our bodies and our employment, family, and property), then to our

• belongingness needs (affiliation, acceptance, affection), then to our

• esteem needs (status, approval, recognition), and finally to our

• self-actualization needs (entertainment, knowledge, creativity, meaning, fulfillment)

In all likelihood, after you put your best data scientists on the task of learning what your customers need from your innovation, and after they apply the most cutting-edge statistical techniques, they will return to you and report that there are these five foundational needs, give or take.

That’s what happened in 2011 when T-Mobile performed a psychographic segmentation of mobile phone users (Figure 13-2). ⁱⁱ The groups that emerged mapped onto Maslow’s hierarchy quite well. (The names that T-Mobile chose for each segment are shown in parentheses). They learned that we use our mobile phones to meet…

• physiological and security needs, by being able to call for help while on the go (“911 Minimalists”)

• belongingness needs, by being able to reach spouses, children, or other relatives (“Family-On-Calls”), and by taking pictures and sharing them with messaging or social networking apps (“Socializers”)

• esteem needs, by buying the latest phone as a status symbol (“Tech-Heads”)

• self-actualization needs, by staying productive at work, while also playing music and games (“Professional Balancers”), or just working (“Workaholics”)

Figure 13-2. Psychographic segmentations of a mobile carrier, a cooking community, and a travel company all yielded Maslow’s needs.

Psychologists of course quibble over whether there are two, four, or seven of these basic needs, and so should you, acknowledging that you’re not concerned with the whole of humanity, only your users. So if you have enough of a population to survey and enough money, don’t just take Maslow’s word for it, perform that psychographic segmentation .

The cooking web site Allrecipes.com also matched Maslow after their psychographic segmentation in 2008 (Figure 13-2). ⁱⁱⁱ They found that we use food-themed sites such as this to meet…

• physiological needs, by learning how to cook something edible to all, or edible by people with dietary restrictions (Learners)

• security needs, by hurriedly feeding our families on hectic days (Providers)

• belongingness needs, by creating a profile and sharing recipes with others (Networkers)

• esteem needs, by throwing an awesome dinner party that our friends compliment (Entertainers)

• self-actualization needs, by enjoying the culinary arts and learning about new organic ingredients from around the world (Foodies)

One stark lesson that psychographic segmentations reveal is that we aren’t just ambivalent about features that meet needs we don’t have, but in fact we loathe them and find them annoying distractions. Those of us who use cooking sites to make life-or-death dietary choices or provide for impatient families have absolutely no interest in making a profile, sharing recipes, and getting wine pairings. Whereas for others among us, the belongingness and esteem needs are what bring us to the site. To us, delighting our friends at a dinner party or even pulling off a Fandango wedding feel just as essential, and we won’t give a hoot about the nutrition information.

These strong feelings derive from a principle that Maslow called prepotency. This means that we only care about the higher needs if our lower ones are met. Now, although it may be true that you can find counter-examples (like a starving artist who meets her self-actualization needs before her physiological ones), in general, this motivational principle is every bit as unforgiving to your meme as were the bottlenecks of attention, perception, and memory. When more basic “needs are unsatisfied,” wrote Maslow, “all other needs may become simply nonexistent or be pushed into the background…The urge to write poetry, the desire to acquire an automobile, the interest in American history, the desire for a new pair of shoes are, in the extreme case, forgotten or become of secondary importance.” This explains why we won’t care to make a profile on a cooking site if we’re just trying to cook for serious health conditions. And why we won’t want to play Flappy Bird on our phones if they aren’t functioning well enough to even call 911 or roadside assistance.

Maslow’s hierarchy also applies to travel and tourism services. In 2011, a psychographic segmentation was performed by People To People International, ^iv the educational travel company engaged by President Dwight Eisenhower to send high-school aged “student ambassadors” abroad in 1963. The parents of the student travelers (who paid the bills) used People to People to meet their kids’…

• physiological and security needs, by providing meals and ensuring their safety (Selectives and Vetters)

• belongingness needs, by letting them travel with old friends and familiar teachers (Group Travelers)

• esteem needs, by giving them good material for college applications (Scholarship Seekers)

• self-actualization needs,by having authentic cultural experiences and being broadened intellectually (Experiencers)

You’ll notice that the needs met by both People To People International and T-Mobile mash physiological and security needs together. This is because many industries (such as service, travel, or tech) don’t help us get food, oxygen, and water. They assume rightly that no one would be a prospective customer if their physiological needs were not already met.

But this brings up an important point: what does it mean if you perform a psychographic segmentation on your users and find that your business is not meeting some of our needs?

It might reveal an opportunity for expansion. Content-based services like news aggregators and streaming video sites can almost always climb Maslow’s pyramid and add functionality to meet our belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization needs. Once you have a good number of users, give us the ability to make profiles, friend or follow others, and send direct messages to help us feel connected to others and accepted by them. A few months later, add ratings of the content that we post and reputation/activity scores to boost our sense of esteem and accomplishment. These easy digital status symbols can be launched with very little costs to you, but they are as compelling to us as any other symbols of social approbation (remember, we’ve been earning ribbons, certificates, plaques, and trophies since grade school).

Another benefit is that we will go to great lengths to protect these status symbols from disappearing after we earn them, including staying active on the site for no other reason. Finally, add games. These may be a loose interpretation of self-actualization features, but they give us the one thing we look for when we have everything else: fun. To be sure, not everyone will use these features. But those among us who do will have a broader array of needs met, stay engaged longer, stimulate the community, and provide content for others to consume.

Facebook is a service that is actually expanding downward in Maslow’s hierarchy: it was originally created to meet our needs for belongingness, esteem, and actualization, and was largely irrelevant to our basic physiology and safety needs. The University of Washington Master of Communications in Digital Media (MCDM) program ^v performed a psychographic segmentation of Facebook users in 2012. They found that we use Facebook to meet…

• belongingness needs, by letting us join interest groups based on politics, art, and music, and using Facebook Connect to link to other web sites (Fans)

• and by keeping connected to the events of family and friends, primarily birthdays, despite being unmotivated by the other things to do on the site (Neutrals)

• esteem needs, by building a personal identity, a commercial brand, and accumulating social capital often with the private forms of communication (Branders)

• by sharing videos, links, and good deals with others and preferring public posting over private messaging (Influencers)

• self-actualization needs, by learning about news, media, and entertainment topics, as curated by our own network (Social Searchers), and by playing games, using apps, and wining coupons (Gamers)

More recently, however, Facebook and its rival Twitter are meeting more basic physiological and safety needs. Twitter has become the de facto AM radio during natural disasters and political upheavals, thus truly playing a life-or-death role for its users.

Perhaps Facebook could also do more to ensure its utility among us when we are at our moments of most extreme need. A particularly extreme example occurred in July 2016 when Diamond Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting death of her boyfriend Philando Castile by police. The sad and profound aspect of this is that Ms. Reynolds likely launched the service feeling that it would help save her own life.

At the other end of the needs spectrum, the philanthropy potential of Facebook has been proven again and again, most recently with the “ice bucket challenge” raising millions for ALS disease in 2014. Could Facebook play a larger, more formal role in raising money and routing resources around the globe? At the very least, if it built features related to finance and payments, a great launch strategy would be to embed them in a narrative of charity and giving.

But if your meme is like Facebook and mainly dedicated to the highest of Maslow’s needs so that we only turn to when everything else is satisfied, you might need to take disposition-matching one step further and focus on our wants. If you have matched our personality and life-stage dispositions, and met our immediate needs, then it is time to think about helping us have fun. We haven’t entirely dodged the what is fun? question, which we take up in the next chapter.