The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow presented what he called the “Hierarchy of Needs”. According to this hierarchy, if a human doesn’t have their basic needs met, then they will be motivated mostly by meeting those basic needs first, giving less importance to the other needs.After fulfilling one group of needs starting with physiological needs, then we will become more motivated to fulfill the next set of needs, which graduates us to the next set of needs, until we fulfill self-actualization at the top of the hierarchy. This can essentially be seen as a scale of motivation. The things that motivate us are the things that fulfill one or more of our needs.

For people that have their physiological and safety needs met, it is easier to create a buzz through the motivation to meet their social and esteem needs. A few of the greatest examples of viral marketing such as Hotmail, MyJournal, MySpace, and Friendster are all examples of this. These companies created a buzz because they offered something unique that fulfill the social and esteem needs through social communications, and social networking.In these cases, the word of mouth buzz gets spread even faster because by spreading the word they fulfill their social and esteem needs at the same time as fulfilling it from the service they’re spreading the word about. It works the same even with the example of free burgers.

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