There are more than 300 types or sizes of toothpaste in retail today. Dozens of new toothpaste SKUs are launched each year. Some 200 hundred of new yogurt varieties. There are 53 varieties of Campbell soup on a supermarket shelf.
How do people decide which toothpaste to buy, which yogurt, or which soup when everything is equally convenient and roughly the same price?
When consumers exit the default grab-and-go mode and pause to deliberate about options, they try to evaluate how each alternative fits into the future they imagine based on the signals about the product available to them at the time.
The alternatives are evaluated on three dimensions: needs, likes, and wants.
Needs help people screen out the options that are not, in their mind, suitable for a job at hand. The requirements of the job may evolve throughout the purchasing process as consumers acquire more information, and so will the screening criteria. Consumers might come into the store looking for a nail and leave with a tube of superglue.
When marketers talk about low-involvement and high-involvement categories of products, they refer to the categories that differ in how firmly the requirements have been formulated and how well-understood the options are. Shampoos, for example, are generally considered low-involvement category because it’s a product that’s bought and used frequently enough for the consumer to remain familiar with it, and what one wants from a shampoo doesn’t change very often. But there’s nothing about shampoos themselves that’s inherently low-involvement. Try, for example, choosing a shampoo in a store on a trip to a country whose language you can’t read. It may be more useful to think about different categories as high-confidence and low-confidence.
I spent a lot of time on trying to understand likes and wants and wrote a longer essay on the subject, but in a nutshell:
Likes have to do with people visualizing how using different products will feel to them and doing mental accounting of pains and pleasures, costs and rewards. Speaking technically, it is the valence of the visualized outcome that determines preference.
The balance between costs and rewards for a brand constantly shifts. If you have been using something for a while, you may feel that buying something different the next time will give you more joy. So to keep the money in the family, brands release new SKUs to prevent people from switching to a competitor.
Wants are psychological drives that have evolved over millions of years to guide our ancestors towards behaviors that would guarantee survival and procreation. When a want is salient and a brand is seen as a way to attain it, the want circuitry overrides likes and needs. One way to tell if a brand is wanted is by a line outside the store on a launch day.