What is Rebel Needs in Marketing ?

[Pinku]

Marketing Term.

[Erica M]

This is based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which contains individual and social needs, among others. Rebel Needs is a term that means marketing individual needs as social needs. For example, cigarette advertisements often show sexy men and women smoking with their friends on a night out. This is intended to market the cigarettes as fulfilling a social need (if you smoke, you will be liked and you will have fun with your friends). But the cigarettes actually fulfill an individual, physical need for most people, which is the addiction to nicotine, which is socially unacceptable. You can't really market a nicotine addiction favorably, so they turn it into a social need. Rebel Needs take individual needs and mask them with social needs. The "rebel" part of it comes from the fact that the consumer's need is not socially acceptable.