After the seller has determined the classification, let’s look at the needs of customers. Let’s first think about a question: What is a rigid demand?
1. Traditional rigid demand
As early as 1943, Maslow proposed five levels of human needs, including physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, respect needs, and self-realization needs. Although divided into levels, for individuals, the order of needs between levels will be different due to differences between each person. From the perspective of socioeconomics, for consumers, which products are rigid needs? Let’s look at a few cases first:
? The weather is cold, and you need to buy warm clothes. At this time, clothes are rigid needs;
? You have been busy all day and have not eaten. At this time, food is a rigid need;
? People need a place to live in their lives. At this time, a house becomes a rigid need;
? Located in a remote area, it is inconvenient to go to work. At this time, a car becomes a rigid need.
The above are what most people think are very traditional rigid needs – food, clothing, housing and transportation. They are also the reason why most businesses do market analysis. After all, the demand is here, and no matter what they do, it won’t be too bad.
2. Definition of rigid needs
The definition of rigid needs in the dictionary is, “Rigid demand (Rigid Demand) refers to demand that is less affected by price in the supply and demand relationship of goods. In a market economy environment, when the supply of goods is insufficient to meet the demand, the price of goods will rise. Rigid demand means that you need to buy it regardless of whether the price rises or not.” Therefore, rigid needs are an irreplaceable rigid demand.
3. The nature of rigid needs
After knowing the definition of rigid needs, think about whether the clothes, food, and cars for commuting mentioned above are rigid needs? Let’s look at a few more examples:
? Buying warm clothes meets the basic physiological need of warmth;
? Buying food to fill the stomach meets the basic physiological need of fullness;
? Buying a house meets the basic need of living;
? Buying a car meets the basic need of normal commuting.
From the above, we can judge that the core of rigid demand is from the perspective of consumers. Customers will buy because “I need it”, not because of other additional features, such as color, style, shape, size and other attributes. This is the first level of rigid demand. However, with the increasing abundance of material life, the transformation of the demand system is also quietly happening. Let’s continue to look at a few examples:
? Buying clothes is not only for keeping warm, but also for wearing good-looking clothes;
? Food satisfies people’s need for fullness, and now they pursue more color, fragrance and taste;
? Cars are not just for commuting, they have become a symbol of status.
So you can see that the same thing itself has not changed, but people’s rigid demand orientation has changed, from “I need it” to “I want it”, from basic physiological needs to higher-level psychological needs, which is the second level of demand.
Going back to our product selection logic, at present, most of the industry classification products on the Amazon platform have gone through the incremental era and are in the stage of stock game, and our rigid demand selection strategy is to find incremental opportunities in the stock market. To put it simply, it is to find the blue ocean in the red ocean, rather than diving into the blue ocean. This may be the root of industrial upgrading. At the same time, in conjunction with the global supply-side reform, efficient matching of the regional market economy can be achieved.
Finally, the conclusion is: from the perspective of consumers, we must fully tap the market stock of “I need it” and discover the new volume in the stock through “I want it”. In this process, everyone needs to pay attention to the emotional consumer psychology of customers hidden behind the rational data of the market. This may be the development trend of e-commerce in the future, the so-called “interest e-commerce”.