Matthew Egol, Mary Beth McEuen, and Emily Falk [Archive.org URL]

To develop authenticity, marketers must learn to connect with the consumer as a whole person, including those drives and motivations that were formerly considered irrelevant to product consumption. One useful body of work for this is the four-drive motivational theory developed by two organizational science professors at Harvard Business School, Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria. In their book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, they proposed that people are motivated and make choices as a result of four innate drives: the drive to acquire possessions and status; the drive to bond and relate with others; the drive to learn and understand the world; and the drive to defend what they consider important. Marketing has long attempted to address these drives, but different campaigns have focused on different ones. The more drives that are taken into consideration by marketers — not just the drives to acquire and defend, but also the drives to bond and learn — the more loyal consumers become. With socially oriented marketing, it’s particularly important to balance all four drives, rather than emphasizing only one or two.

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