The Human Need is One, and That is Relevance
By: Carine Bouery
Tags: Human Need, Marketing, Meaning, Social Media, Relevance

As I write this blog, I am also updating my company profile, typing out a women’s network event plan, responding to WhatsApp messages and editing a video of my upcoming workshop directly through my smart phone, while of course, creating different versions of it to go on different social media platforms.

Thanks to this blog, I stopped for a minute and wondered: “Why am I doing all this?”

Growing your own business involves many hours of thinking, doing, marketing and testing so that you are more agile and ready for the next leap. It is a time-consuming and erratic process based on a feedback loop with inconclusive insights collected in uncertain times by confused people.

Self-reinvention never stops because relevance never stays in one place.

Self-reinvention is an important skill to muster and master in this ever-changing day and age of needs. By constantly reinventing ourselves: our image, offerings, business model and marketing campaigns, we are keeping ourselves relevant.

Relevance is defined as “the state of being closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. To be relevant is to be a significant link or an important component of a bigger entity or scheme such as an organization, an economy or the future.

Working professionals across all generations look for relevance in the business world and so do marketing campaigns to be effective. Relevance builds our sense of identity and belonging and gives us a reason to exist.

Social media helps us stay relevant, but marketing can’t keep up.

Looking at how social media fulfills Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs in the image below, we see different social media platforms placed on different levels of the pyramid, but that may not apply if our current situation is dictated by whether we are surviving, living, thriving, self-actualizing, or doing a bit of all at the same time (like I am). If you’re looking for a job, you go on LinkedIn to secure yourself financially (Physiological/Safety) and you also publish an article there to reach out to business prospects and share your knowledge with others (Belonging/Self-Esteem/Self-actualization).

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and How Social Media Fulfills Them

In Zhu’s and Chen’s Social Media Matrix, the satisfaction we get for connecting (Relationships), cooperating (Collaboration), communicating (Self-Media) and creating (Creative Outlets) comes from the root need to be relevant with the people, processes and platforms we associate ourselves with for different purposes, whether we are posters in one group/page or followers in another within the same platform.

Zhu’s and Chen’s Social Media Matrix 2015 reference to the white paper “Social Media and human need satisfaction: Implications for social media marketing”

Humans are multifaceted, complex beings who have strived to give meaning to their existence through different avenues since the beginning of humanity. As humans, we face a constant battle between figuring out what we really need, what the world needs from us and what marketing campaigns think we need. In the spaces in between, we are continuously filtering out or funneling in what makes sense or what feels good to us, and this is unique to everyone.