A while back when I was the director of marketing for a small publishing company I had a boss who liked to say, "All people are motivated by two things: fear and greed.  To sell them something you either scare the s*** out of them or entice them with the keys to the kingdom."  This caused me some momentary consternation as I was young and still had a dash of idealism, but time has proven him more right than wrong.

Of course my boss had taken too limited a view.  Most people’s third primary motivation is sex, although some academics confuse this motivation with man’s need to reproduce.  That, of course, is foolishness.  Our motivation for sex must be much more complex than simple reproduction, for if it were not there would be no way to explain the birth of so many fundamentalists.  However, I digress.

What caused me to think that my former boss was missing a third of the motivational trifecta, was this "Old Marketing vs. New Marketing" list from the blog "Creating Passionate Users":

Take a look at the item about half way down (you can click on the picture to see a larger version), the one that says "Old Way: Ads that imply you’ll get laid if you drink/use this product and New Way: Develop and support a socially-oriented online community and/or local user groups where people might get laid for real."  Exactly.

There’s a reason why the oldest profession is so old, and that’s because it addresses all three of man’s most fundamental motivations.  Desire for sex, fear of not having sex and an incessant and greedy quest for ever more sex. In fact the oldest profession addresses man’s motivations so well that it has survived for millenia on word-of-mouth alone. Ooh, bad pun…sorry.

Lest you think that I’m speaking only of men when I say "man’s" motivation, then I will remind you that one of the great cultural phenomena of the past several years was "Sex and the City" which was all about four women who were constantly having sex, were worried about having sex (or something related to sex like their sagging body parts), or wanting to have more sex (or sex partners).

What this means for us marketers is that we need to find a way to address all three core motivations.  Some products like sandpaper don’t readily lend themselves to fear/greed/sex marketing hooks, but I’m certain that given enough time and creativity we could come up with some.  It would probably have something to do with splinters.