A lot of content fails before anyone reads it. The writing is fine. Nobody asked why a stranger would stop scrolling for it.
Every post, image and ad has to answer one question for the person looking at it: why would I care? There is a short list of honest answers, and Abraham Maslow wrote most of it down in 1943.
The question behind every piece of content
We run a simple drill on our own content, including the images we make in Mavic. Three questions, asked in order.
What does this communicate? How does it influence the person looking at it? Why would anyone care?
The first two are easy, and people usually answer by describing the thing. This image shows one chat handling research, copy and design, so it looks like an easy all-in-one tool. That describes the feature and stops one question short.
The third question is where the work is. It forces you to name what the viewer gets in their own life, not what the product does.
Maslow gives that question a short list of possible answers. We build an AI marketer, so we have a stake in this, but the framework earns its place on any marketing team.
Five needs, five kinds of content
Maslow’s 1943 paper, “A theory of human motivation”, described five groups of need: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. Content can speak to any of them. Here is one well-known brand example for each, described by what it talks to, not by how well it sold.
Physiological: the body
Snickers launched “You’re not you when you’re hungry” in 2010. The idea is that hunger changes how you behave, and a Snickers fixes it. Food is the most basic need on Maslow’s list, and the ad speaks to it directly.
Safety: staying protected
Volvo’s three-point seat belt, designed by engineer Nils Bohlin, was patented in 1958 and fitted as standard from 1959. Volvo then made the patent available to every other car maker. Volvo’s own estimate is that the belt has saved more than a million lives.
Here the content is the proof itself: a protective feature, given away so others could use it.
Love and belonging: being part of something
In 2011, Coca-Cola Australia swapped its usual branding for the 150 most popular first names in the country. The product did not change. What changed is that you could find your own name, or a friend’s, and hand it over.
Coca-Cola says it sold more than 250 million named bottles and cans that summer, in a nation of just under 23 million people.
Esteem: status and self-worth
L’Oréal Paris launched “Because I’m worth it” in 1971, written by copywriter Ilon Specht at McCann for Préférence hair colour. The line says nothing about the product. It tells the buyer something about herself, which is the mark of an esteem message: the benefit is being valued, starting with by yourself.
Self-actualisation: becoming more
Nike’s “Just Do It”, created by Dan Wieden at Wieden+Kennedy in 1988, talks to the top of the list. NPR’s history of the campaign describes the slogan as deliberately open, so anyone can apply it to whatever they hope to achieve. The product is shoes. The promise is the person you are trying to become.
A lens, not a law
Maslow’s model is useful, and its limits are worth stating plainly. Maslow never drew a pyramid. The first pyramid appeared in a 1960 Business Horizons article by Charles McDermid.
Maslow himself said the order of needs was not rigid and that they overlap. Research agrees. A study by Louis Tay and Ed Diener, using Gallup surveys from 123 countries between 2005 and 2010, found the needs look universal, but the order they are met in matters little for wellbeing.
For content, that means one post can speak to more than one need, and the same person can care for different reasons on different days. Use the five as prompts for better questions, not as boxes to sort people into.
So which need does Mavic target?
We ran the drill on one of our own images. It shows a single chat prompt handling research, copywriting, calendar management and design. Asked what it communicates, a teammate said it is an easy, all-in-one tool. Asked why anyone would care, the answer was that it removes tedious work.
That is a fair answer to the first two questions, but it is still a feature. Saving effort is not one of Maslow’s five needs. So the real question is which need sits underneath it.
Our reading is that it depends on who is looking. For a small or overloaded team, it is mostly safety: keeping up without the work piling up, and keeping output on brand so it passes review. For a marketer, it is esteem: delivering polished work that reflects well on them. For a founder or brand owner, there is a self-actualisation pull too, which is doing more than a team of their size should be able to.
Because Mavic always works from your brand, the safety message is consistency, and the esteem message is work you are proud to put your name to. That is our interpretation, not a measured result, and one image can speak to several needs.
The point is to pick the lead need on purpose. Then make the headline, image and proof serve it.
A five-step drill for your next post
- Describe it. What does this content communicate?
- Predict the effect. How does it influence the person looking at it?
- Ask the hard one. Why would anyone care?
- Name one need. Pick the lead need from Maslow’s five, and write what the buyer gets in their own life, not what the product does.
- Check the proof. Does the headline, image and evidence deliver on that need? Adjust until they do.
If you cannot name the need in one sentence, the content is not ready.
Sources
- Scientific American, Q&A on who created Maslow’s pyramid
- Wikipedia, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- University of Illinois news, 2011, on the Tay and Diener study of 123 countries
- GWI, Snickers case study
- Volvo Cars press release, 2009, on the three-point seat belt
- The Coca-Cola Company, how Share a Coke started in Australia
- L’Oréal Paris USA, the final copy of Ilon Specht
- NPR, 2022, on the history of Nike’s Just Do It
