This work attempts a constructive critical approach to Chapter 3 - “Marketing and the satisfaction of needs” in the book by Jean Jacques Lambin Strategic Marketing, 1 taking as a reading position the psychoanalytic foundations that correspond to these questions.
Lambin starts from a question that asks the ethical foundations of marketing, that of itself operates as a mechanism for satisfying needs or creating nonexistent needs.
Before answering this question, a tour of the main positions in the field of Economics, Marketing and Experimental Psychology is proposed. We will add a psychoanalytic reading
Regarding Political Economy, he indicates that it produces a stealth of the issue by implicitly equating real behavior with preferences and vice versa, with which motivation and its computers are not questioned.
A first reference to the field of Marketing theorizations is to Kotler, who develops a differentiation compared to the psychoanalysis of Lacanean roots, that of need, desire and demand.
In a very tight form of presentation, Kotler defines necessity as “A feeling of deprivation with respect to a general satisfaction linked to the human condition” 2, thereby covering the notion of generic Necessity linked to 'human nature' not created by the marketing, pre-existing to the demand in express or latent state and stable in its number. Desire would be a privileged means of satisfying a need. Its forms are multiple and changing. Desires translate into potential Demand for specific products. For Kotler, marketing aims to influence wants and demand, not needs.
For Psychoanalysis, the need as requirements of the species for food, habitat, reproduction, is dramatically affected by the insertion of the human offspring in the culture, and in this to the effects that language produces on the body and its genetic needs. -biological. Psychoanalysis emphasizes, emphasizes the effects of "the function and field of word and language" 3. Becoming subject to the field of language affects the circuit of the imbalance-equilibrium movement of a 'mythical' biological need that quickly becomes a field of desire in humans. Living in language forces the speaker-being4 to process his needs in the field of words, in the gorges of the signifier, with which the strictly 'needs' are transmuted into desires, through the mediation of the demands in which desire is formulated.Lacan designates as demand that putting into discourse that articulates the relation of the subject to the Other. Another as a notion that writes in capital letters as it transcends the like and that indicates the field of language and the regulatory law of exchanges. Another who has in the incest prohibition law its central articulation in the passage from nature to culture.
When speaking of necessity the first reference seems to be to primary aspects, 'animals' if you will, of human breeding. They would have instinctive determination, they would respond to preformed behavior, they would have a specific object. The subject and the object presuppose themselves defined and apprehensible. The need would respond to a circuit that goes from the imbalance due to the increase in tension to the restitution of balancing homeostasis. This circuit of what is necessary is what is affected in the human field.
This involvement is not chronological. It has the impression of a chronology. It is assumed that there were first physiological, biological, genetic needs, and then social, cultural, 'spiritual' wants and demands that affected them. It seems to be a possible description of the child's temporal alternatives in its structuring. In truth it is not a circuit of the necessary layout and then altered by culture. The circuit of the 'necessary' could not be traced. The human being comes into the world in conditions of relative prematurity and having to go through an extended time of defenselessness in which the effective intervention of the Other is a necessary condition for her subsistence. Thus, it is introduced into a world flooded with words that precede it, surround it, signify it, and use it. From the First and Last Name, document numbers,Nationality, and other forms of symbolic registration that 'tie' it to language and its effects of fragmentation and identification. The resource of the human child of the cry, a cry born of necessity, born of the tension of the biological body, is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.555and other forms of symbolic registration that 'surround' language and its effects of fragmentation and identification. The resource of the human child of the cry, a cry born of necessity, born of the tension of the biological body, is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5and other forms of symbolic registration that 'surround' language and its effects of fragmentation and identification. The resource of the human child of the cry, a cry born of necessity, born of the tension of the biological body, is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.55555The resource of the human child of the cry, a cry born of necessity, born of the tension of the biological body, is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5The resource of the human child of the cry, a cry born of necessity, born of the tension of the biological body, is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5it is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5it is soon lost in the social and family discourses that interpret it. The body begins to be interpreted, marked by symbolism. Each culture or subculture will leave its marks and imprints even in the most primary forms of resolution of the vital. The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5The 'necessity' to which culture orders, arms, guides, becomes through the tracing of a specific postponement, demands in which desires inflect, crystallize, flourish. We will advance in the developments that specify the position of psychoanalysis starting from that tripartition of Need, Demand, Desire and its impact on the field of Marketing.5
We continue accompanying him to JJLambin. Explore other categorizations of Need. Some rejects them, others rescue partial aspects.
It questions the differentiation of true and false needs implied in the criticism that Attali and Guillaume maintain around the distinction between need and desire. We reproduce a sufficiently explicit section: “Since the vast majority of our current needs are indeed of cultural origin, where should the line of demarcation be established and, above all, who will be the enlightened dictator of consumption?” 6. We adhere to his criticism. In the postulation of false needs, what is questioned under a not always explicit moralistic bias, is the desiring condition of the human being. Equating desire to 'false need' is a normative prejudice.
It then stops at the distinction between absolute needs and relative needs. The innate ones would be absolute, inherent to nature or to the organism. The cultural and social ones would be relative. Keynes and Galbraith would emphasize this differentiation.
The saturable, satiable aspects of the absolute and innate and non-saturable, insatiable needs of the relative, acquired calls are highlighted.
For Lamban the difference is far from being so clear. "Needs of psycho-sociological origin can be felt in the same way as the most basic needs" 7. We fully agree with this appreciation, the most elemental and 'absolute' is dramatically affected by the most 'relative' and cultural. The diet that could be thought of as absolute necessity, is affected by the symbolism of the Brand, with which that difference does not hold. And therefore what is not sustained is the general saturation.
The impossibility of general saturation is in correspondence with the structurally unsatisfied character of human desire. The discovery of psychoanalysis is that desire, becoming a field of relation to the Other, becomes a desire for "something else", in a movement in which arrests and crystallizations are only partial and temporary. It is the ever-potential relaunch of desire that defines the essentials of its moving structure.
Lambin then stops at a distinction proposed by Abbott and Planchon, between generic need and derived need. “The derived need is the concrete technological response (the good) contributed to the generic need and it is also the object of desire.” 8 By introducing the concrete technological response, the life cycle that defines the saturation, now relative of the derived need subject to progress and the ups and downs of technology. The impossibility of general saturation finds a limit in the derived saturation, which, however, does not annul this general principle, but rather gives it the substrate of its dynamics.
After reviewing the positions of the Economy and Marketing, it leaves some strong conclusions:
- For the economist, motivation does not arise since he considers preferences as data. While 'needs' are mostly of cultural origin, marketing contributes to their evolution and movement. Due to the relative nature of many needs, the desire to acquiring superior products has its own life. There can be no general saturation. Its object is almost unlimited.
Agreeing, we add: more than the 'numerous' quantifier, every need is linked to the field of desire, through the mediations of demand.
What remains of need and that demand does not express or include, is what I wish to bid on in the dissatisfaction-satisfaction dialectic.
The particular position of the human animal in the field of language, its subjection to the polysemy that is inherent in it, forces it to put into changing demands what is mobilized in its unconscious desire. What remains of need operates as a pulsing floor articulated to the desire in which it is threaded.
The idea of necessity is suspended in psychoanalysis, 'almost' nullified.
The notion of desire has a prevalence of symbolic determination, it depends on the subjective position. The lawsuits are the statements in which only this desiring operation is caught.
It is worth mentioning here a precision that Jacques Lacan proposes: “Desire is what manifests itself in the interval that digs the demand closer to itself, insofar as the subject, when articulating the significant chain, brings to light the it lacks in being with the call to receive the complement of the Other, if the Other, place of the word, is also place of that lack ”.9
Desire digs a hole in the demands, moved from that drive floor. The drive, a specific term for the human being, is a complex concept that needs to be defined in terms of drive, source, goal and object. We could affirm with a certain explanatory license, that the instinct and its genetic determinations, undergoing the effects of insertion in the symbolic world of demands and desires, become specific, become a drive.
These brief notes are not intended to exhaust psychoanalytic considerations in this regard, but to begin to state them.
JJLambin takes a turn in the search for foundation and addresses experimental psychology trying to discover the objects of human motivation, a certain number of general motivational orientations. In this journey we find strong points of coincidence with the psychoanalytic developments to which, however, Lambin does not make explicit reference.
In its development based on experimental psychology, it leads to “three general motivational orientations that can account for a great diversity of behaviors and that appear as explanatory factors for the general well-being of the individual. These determinants can be grouped under the three terms: comfort, pleasure and stimulation ”10.
Defining the general motivational Orientations with the words: comfort, pleasure and stimulation will allow us to return to some categories of psychoanalysis such as the Pleasure-Displacer Principle, the Reality Principle, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Categories developed in S. Freud's work and articulable to J.Lacan's points about Pleasure, Desire and Enjoyment.
We return to the Lambin text.
Part of putting the 'stimulus-response' theory into discussion. This is located in the plane of the organism and its vicissitudes around the excitation, the imbalance and the discharge reflex that the return to equilibrium entails. This theoretical position attempts a transfer from the organic body to the soul life, to place there also and specifically as a function of the Ego this dimension of balance, regulation. This idea of the return to homeostatic equilibrium is also a starting point in Freudian developments. Freud questions it by postulating the other principles already stated.
Lambin summarizes the central elements of the 'stimulus response' theory:
Take motivation in terms of energy mobilization. It aims primarily at physiologically based impulses. The starting point is in the exciting-stimulus and the mechanism tends to restore balance. The supposed natural state would be inactivity.
The criticism of this approach and its simplifications is that “the motivational mechanism is reduced to a process of reduction of tension and the ascending phase of motivation, that is, the process by which new tensions or disagreements are established, is practically ignored ”11
Freud made this critical journey around the reflex arc theory that supports Reflexology and part of Behaviorism.
The search for homeostatic balance, enunciable as the Principle of Pleasure, does not account for most human acts. Produced the experience of satisfaction, as the first mythically postulated experience, the response to the imbalance due to overstimulation summons the hallucinatory attempt at reproduction in the identity of perception. Their failure involves a detour that is nothing more than desiring postponement. The search is reformulated as an identity of thought. The detour that the Principle of Reality entails implies the postponement, the unsatisfied support of the desired according to the law and the prohibition. It is because of the prohibition that is desired and postponed, with a certain degree of dissatisfaction, the desired balancing resolution.It is by law and in this by insertion in the field of language that 'need' finds its limits while a dimension of distance, of lack, is established. Psychoanalysis privileges the relationship of the human subject to failure. It is lack that drives desire. It is the distance between the desired pleasure and the satisfaction achieved that drives it. The Freudian Principle of Reality can be defined as a modification of the Pleasure-Displacer Principle. It would be equivalent to the latter plus the lack. The Principle of Reality can correspond with the notion of desire.The Freudian Principle of Reality can be defined as a modification of the Pleasure-Displacer Principle. It would be equivalent to the latter plus the lack. The Principle of Reality can correspond with the notion of desire.The Freudian Principle of Reality can be defined as a modification of the Pleasure-Displacer Principle. It would be equivalent to the latter plus the lack. The Principle of Reality can correspond with the notion of desire.
Although we accompany Lambin in his criticism of the limitations of the 'stimulus response' theory, we differ in the resource with which he questions that limit.
Lambín resorts to experimental psychology and the emphasis placed on the spontaneous activity of the nervous system. It lies there in the notion of awakening. The brain would not operate by reactivity but the activity would be "natural" to the nervous system. It is not inert but its activity would constitute a system of self-motivation. "The general state of motivation with the function of awakening or activation from the reticular formation of the brain stem is identified." "The level of awakening is measured by variations in electrical current that are controlled by an electroencephalograph." 12
There would be an optimal level of awakening, which is associated with comfort and well-being, as it levels excesses or weaknesses of the nervous system.
We hold a strongly critical position to this argument. The reference to the brain and central nervous system seems to point towards an objectifying resource, but it really hides the question. The discoveries of the neurosciences, although they will be able to bring the foundation of physiological operations closer together, will not be enough to account for human desire. In this we have the explanatory force of the applications that in this direction make up the field of cultural sciences, beginning if you will with Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology and centrally Psychoanalysis. "Desire is the desire of the other", a Hegelian formula that admitted its critical reprocessing in the field of psychoanalysis, shows us where to locate the path of desire. Not rejecting the physiological substrate,but not trivializing causality. Between a self-motivating brain and "desire is the desire of the other" there is an extremely rich and productive conceptual abyss.
We believe that it is through the link of the human subject to language, to prohibition, to law, that desire sustains what is motivating. We do not reject that the cerebral physiology of a material substrate form in correspondence with the possibilities and developments of the desiderative field, but we do not find its foundations there.
Melancholy, just to take an example, is not the effect of a low cerebral awakening but of the determinations of infant experience and its strong determinations, of what since Freud is designated in terms of the transit through the Oedipus Complex and the Castration Complex. The uniqueness of this transit and the up-to-date support of its operations decide on the subjective structuring and from there they may have detectable consequences in technological measurements or mapping.
The insistence on seeking 'causality' around the organ, dismisses all developments in Human Sciences. It gives a semblance of scientificity, of objectivity, of positivity, of 'concreteness' that clouds the obscurantism that is sustained in it.
If consistent with that premise based on brain awakening, marketing should be motivationally oriented, privileging the psychopharmacological pathway.
Although this starting point can be strongly criticized in its consequences, it does not prevent Lambin from circumventing it when his argumentation requires it.
It places "a first general motivational orientation of individuals: to ensure comfort or prevent discomfort."
The stress reduction behavior defines the essence of this first orientation of the motivational.
But immediately it requires to be considered another level that no longer has to do with reducing tensions but with "raising a level of awakening too weak."
He introduces “the need for stimulation” there, which is strongly summarized with the statement: “man needs to have need”, as a basic motivation that is added to the reduction of tension. The connection with statements from Psychoanalysis is easily located: "desire is the desire to continue wishing".
So far Lambín defines two motivational operators, comfort as a reduction of tension and the stimulus as the need to have need, the ascending phase of motivation.
It also defines a third factor: pleasure. Noting that "the process of satisfying a need is pleasant in itself and encourages the body to continue the activity it has been launched into and out of."
Thus, it presents three motivational operators: comfort, stimulation and pleasure.
We propose putting it in correlation with the developments of Freud and Lacan: the Principle of Pleasure would be in correspondence with the balance of the Ego in a homeostatic context always put in disruption, but as such it would tend to eliminate displeasure. We then relate the Pleasure-Displacer Principle to the idea of "comfort" and stress reduction.
The Principle of Reality that "inserts" the lack on the path to balancing pleasure, is redefined by Lacan as the very field of desire. It is related to Lambín's idea of “need for stimulation”.
Freud needed to propose a third principle of psychic functioning that goes beyond balance and lack, and postulates a different form of 'pleasure' than homeostasis. It designates a Beyond the principle of Pleasure, which Lacan names as Enjoyment. Field to display in its alternatives ranging from sexual enjoyment, to sublimatory enjoyment, to the potential enjoyment of symptomatic suffering tinged with the dimension of guilt. Not all of this last field matters to marketing. However, in a certain sense we can link the psychoanalytic notion of Goce, that different 'pleasure' to the egoic, homeostatic pleasure, with what Lambin names as 'pleasure', in the sense of enjoyment through use-consumption.
Summarizing the paths of Psychoanalysis:
PRINCIPLE OF PLEASURE - DISPLACER
- Return to Yoico balance
Homeostasis - Synthesis Avoidance of the unpleasant Pleasure as Comfort
REALITY PRINCIPLE
- Non-contingent rodeo to pleasure
Postpone satisfaction or give up some alternatives
Relation to a fault
Dimension of Desire
BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
- Partial drive satisfaction
Repetitive compulsion
Fragment of the Oedipus - Loss in Sexuality-Know-Love
Enjoyment alternatives: sexual enjoyment - sublimatory enjoyment - superegoic enjoyment
These notions, only outlined here, require development around the following thematic correlations:
The Pleasure-Displacer to the topic of the Imaginary, to the dimensions of the specular, to the theorizing about the Self and Narcissism.
Desire centrally articulated to the Formations of the Unconscious, to the logic of
Symbolic, its metaphorical-metonymic operations. To the symbolic mesh and its efficiencies.
The Enjoyment linked to the dimension of the traumatic, the embedded Real, operating from an intimate-exteriority and articulated to the desiderative movement. Link desire and trauma.
Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, as central categories in psychoanalytic theorizing that define the particularity of their knotting forms. So there Lacan postulates the Borromean Knot as its formalization. A triple articulation of lack.
Lambin maintains that with the explanation of these motivational operators "we are in a better position to respond to inquiries directed at marketing". Agreeing with this consideration, we add that the journey through the formulations of psychoanalysis complicates and enriches its approach.
Notes
1 Jean Jacques Lambin- Strategic Marketing - Madrid - Mc Graw Hill - 1995
2 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. P. 69
3 Reference to a privileged writing by Lacan, known as the Rome Discourse: "Function and Field of Word and Language in Psychoanalysis" - Writings 1 - Bs.As. - Ed. XXI century - 1983
4 Reference to a term produced by Jacques Lacan: “parlettre”
5 In another work to be published: "Interrogating the motivation, the need, the demand and the desire", we expand on these considerations.
6 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. P. 70
7 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. P. 72
8 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. P. 73
9 Jacques Lacan - The direction of the cure and the principles of its power - Writings 1 - Bs.As. - Ed. XXI century - 1983
10 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. P. 82
11 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. P. 76
12 Jean Jacques Lambin- op.cit. page 76
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