Focus On 8 Consumer "Hungers" To Supercharge Your Marketing

This expert opinion by Adam Hanft, CEO of Hanft Ideas, was originally published on Inc.com.

Rodent-averse Ralph Waldo Emerson has been quoted as saying that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Though no Peter Drucker, Emerson captured something essential about innovation, a model which later became the bedrock entrepreneurial wisdom of “Find a need and fill it.”

But simply identifying consumer needs is not enough. Whether with new products or through positioning existing ones, marketers must go from simply fulfilling practical needs, which our consumer economy is highly efficient at, to satisfying our raging emotional hungers.

That’s the basis of my new framework for a post-scarcity world.

Find A Hunger And Satisfy The Appetite.

Hunger is more primal than a need. Hunger is the psychological outcome of “wanting.” The distinction is rooted in how our brains work. Research in neuroscience shows that while needs relate to states of deprivation, wanting triggers motivation.  

Consider the profound marketing implications of that. The physiological need for calories doesn’t drive behavior as much as anticipating how great it feels to eat something wonderful.

Marketers must learn to master the catalytic power of psychological and cultural hungers—not the sterile realm of functional benefits and rational purchase drivers. 

Here are some examples of brands that satisfy hungers, followed by a “hunger framework,” and some advice on how to find and feed that emotional gluttony.

The Hunger For Daily Progress

Duolingo, the wildly successful language-learning app, fills a clear need on the surface. But while competitors like Rosetta Stone and Babbel stagnated, Duolingo became a cultural phenomenon with 103 million monthly users, 32 percent of them accessing the app daily.

The difference? Duolingo understood that people don’t have a burning need to learn Spanish or French—otherwise, they’d be fluent from high school classes. What people hunger for is the compelling feedback loop of daily accomplishment, the dopamine hit of maintaining a streak, the social validation of visible progress.

In fact, users who maintain a 7-day streak are 3.6 times more likely to remain engaged long-term.

Duolingo satisfies the hunger for personal efficacy.  

Oatly, And The Hunger For Being David

For decades, Oatly marketed rational benefits for its oat milk, like “cholesterol-lowering” and “calcium-enriched.” Sales stayed flat.

The trajectory changed when they reached beyond vegans and targeted broader consumers who had a hunger to reject standardized marketing and were wired to celebrate David and trash Goliath.

It started with their irreverent positioning, “It’s like milk, but made for humans.” Oatly’s packaging has unconventional copy like “Time to open this package and try what’s inside, I guess.”

Its website was equally norm-busting; it even documented “scandals they’ve had to deal with in the past—boycotts, bad press, online insults….”

The hunger Oatly satisfies isn’t for calcium or protein or even environmental virtue-signaling. It’s the hunger to be the kind of person who gets the joke, who appreciates the weird, who’s savvy enough to be in on something before it becomes mainstream.

While every brand claims to be “authentic” and “sustainable,” Oatly satisfies the hunger for genuine cultural belonging and moral coherence wrapped in self-aware irony.

A Handy Hunger Taxonomy

Duolingo and Oatly are just two examples. To help you on your hunger trek, let’s see what other post-need human desires are there for the tapping. Reading them, I’m sure you will be able to make some immediate connections to your own brand and marketing activities.

Narrative—Identify Hunger: People want a compact, sharable story about who they are (or aspire to be).

Competence—Mastery Hunger: Humans aspire to be better, measure progress, and earn visible badges.

Novelty—Discovery Hunger: The powerful delight that is experienced from treasure hunts, expected finds, and the seduction of surprise.

Belonging—Ritual Hunger: The yearning for small, repeatable social acts that signal membership.

Status—Distinction Hunger: The drive to be noticed and differentiated; this may not involve traditional luxury, but strategic signaling.

Agency—Control Hunger: An endless search for feeling securely in command of outcomes.

Hedonic—Physiological Hunger: The most obvious, immediate sensory pleasures and indulgence.

Moral—Purpose hunger: Last but certainly not least, the wish to feel ethically coherent and useful.

The Hungers Are Waiting

Every day, marketers are out in the field, prowling and scanning for consumer insights. They’re doing surveys, running focus groups, conducting ethnographies, and sticking people’s brains under fMRIs. 

That’s all well and good, but too much of it is focused on Emerson’s need to eliminate mice and not enough of Duolingo’s construct of eliminating the void of incompleteness.

So, my advice is to keep on doing your research thing, but frame it differently. Stop asking “What do people need?” Start asking: “What do people feel anxious, incomplete, or inadequate about?”

The space between someone who is and who they want to be—that’s where hungers are born.

As part of that, recognize that the most powerful hungers emerge from cultural tensions. Duolingo thrives because we live in a moment that valorizes self-improvement while creating conditions that make sustained focus nearly impossible.

Hungers start from within and are magnified from without, so be vigilant about analyzing what’s being mocked, celebrated, or debated in the zeitgeist

Oatly succeeds because environmental consciousness collides with consumer culture—people hunger for a way to be ethical and indulgent.

Because here’s the truth that Emerson couldn’t have anticipated: We are at a place where every mousetrap works reasonably well, and in fact, there’s always the Terminix guy.

People don’t beat a path to your door for functionality. They come for the way your brand satiates their hunger once they arrive.