Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in a business class. Now get ready to answer the questions. You may use your notes

OK, uh let’s um, let’s start. Uh, today we’re gonna talk about marketing. Does marketing create or satisfy needs? As stated in Chapter one, marketing shapes consumers’ needs and wants, they do not create those needs. Needs are basic human requirements that preexists marketers. The hierarchy of needs that exists is physiological including basic food, water, and shelter; safety, that is, selfpreservation; social, that is, love and friendship; personal including status, and self-respect; and self-actualization, that means, personal fulfillment. These needs can be stated, real, unstated, delight, and secret. Needs, wants, and demands are a core foundation for marketing. Marketing is the process of identifying, influencing, and satisfying those needs, on human and society. Marketers do not just respond to consumers’ needs. The basic desire to survive is a need. A specific fulfillment of that need is a want. Demands are wants for specific products or services, with the ability to buy. A skillful marketer understands the needs, influences the wants, and promotes ideas that lead consumers to make unnecessary purchases. The skillful marketer takes the basic need to a higher level that stimulates and generates a need or want that influences and motivates the consumers to satisfy that want. Marketing does not offer one-dimensional products, but multi-dimensional products offerings promoted through a variety of choices and propaganda. However, budgets, needs, and wants help the consumer to make the specific choice. Herein is the marketers’ ability to shape the needs and wants, and then satisfy those needs and wants.
    Critics claim that marketers create new products and services for the consuming public, and make them believe they are needs so consumers will buy more and spend money unnecessarily. I believe the notion of creating a new need is false. As stated in chapter one of the text, "needs are basic human requirements." Wants on the other hand, "are shaped by one’s society." It is my belief that marketers are able to research, exactly what the needs are of specific markets, and apply marketing techniques and tools to best fit consumers’ needs.
    Consumers already have specific needs and wants, and marketers are just utilizing the Information Age and specific information about target markets so that their products and services are highly demanded. Many tools are available today that marketers can leverage to gather mass quantities of information about specific markets. They then manipulate that information to develop products and services that match exactly what that specific market desires; therefore consumers want more of that commodity. Peter Drucker once stated, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available, is exactly why critics claim consumers are spending unnecessarily.
    Another reason I believe the critics who claim, "Marketers shape the needs and wants of consumers," say this because of what consumers have today compared to what they had in the past; increased buying power, greater variety of goods and services, greater amount of information, greater ease in interacting and placing orders, and the ability to compare with other consumers. All of these factors are not because marketers have created new needs and wants, but because they utilize those trends to better meet the needs and wants of consumers. Marketing has become almost entirely consumer driven, which means that marketers select their target market and then create the product or service that is most needed and demanded.
    In conclusion, marketing has just become a first-mover business, where the first company that discovers the target market specific needs and wants will develop a product or service to satisfy that market. With the increased buying power that is apparent today and the decrease in brand loyalty, consumers are likely to buy those products and services offered because they are available.