Market threshold
needs; and the need for self-actualization.
Among the physiological needs are food, water,
sleep and sex. Safety needs include security,
stability, protection, freedom from fear, from
anxiety and from chaos; the need for structure,
order, law, limits; the preference for the familiar
over the unfamiliar, the known rather than the
unknown; for religion.
Maslow writes that the threat of chaos or
humiliation can be expected in most human
beings ‘to produce a regression from any higher
needs to the prepotent safety needs, so that a
common, almost expectable reaction, is the
easier acceptance of dictatorship or of military
rule’ and this is ‘most true of those living near
the safety line’. Such people are ‘particularly
disturbed by threats to authority, to legality, and
to the representatives of the law’ (see main-
streaming). Belongingness and loving needs
include the ‘deeply animal tendency to herd, to
fl ock, to join, to belong’.
Maslow’s highest-order need is self-actualiza-
tion, where a person seeks and fi nds fulfi lment:
‘A musician must make music, an artist must
paint if they are ultimately to be at peace with
themselves.’ ‘What a man can be, he must be.’
Th e term self-actualization was coined by Kurt
Goldstein in The Organism (American Book,
1939), and means, in Maslow’s words, ‘to become
everything that one is capable of becoming’.
The fulfilment of needs, Maslow argues,
depends on essential preconditions, obviously
at the physiological level the availability of food
and water, but at the higher levels such condi-
tions as ‘freedom to speak, freedom to do what
one wishes so long as no harm is done to others,
freedom to express oneself, freedom to investi-
gate and seek for information, freedom to defend
oneself ’. In Maslow’s view ‘secrecy, censorship,
dishonesty, blocking of communication threat-
ens all the basic needs’.
An essential part of the process of self-actual-
ization is the desire to know and to understand,
‘to systematize, to organize, to analyse, to look
for relations and meanings, to construct a
system of values’ and these aspects too tend
towards a hierarchy: to know leads us to want to
understand. Within this frame too are aesthetic
needs. Maslow speaks of some individuals who
‘get sick (in special ways) from ugliness, and are
cured by beautiful surroundings’.
Th e hierarchy as cited by Maslow is dynamic
and capable of reversal. Some people for
example may go for esteem before love (though
at the same time these individuals may ‘seek
self-assertion for the sake of love rather than▶Terence A. Shrimp, Integrated Marketing Commu-
nications in Advertising & Promotion (Thomson
South-Western, 2009).
Market threshold Decisions on media produc-
tion – whether to initiate, go ahead or continue
with media enterprises – depend more and more
on whether there is a suffi ciently large percentage
of consumers to warrant investment. Th e market
threshold is the critical point at which a media
artefact justifi es, fi nancially, its existence; and
the greater the competition within the market,
the more critical that threshold becomes.
Marxist (mode of media analysis) Focuses
on social confl ict, which is seen as being essen-
tially derived from the mode of production in
capitalist societies. Karl Marx argued that the
culture – and communication process – of a
capitalist society refl ects the norms and values
of that section of the community which owns
the means of production: out of the dominant
class springs the dominant ideology which
the media serve to disseminate and reinforce in
the ‘disguise’ of consensus.
Marxist analysts have employed three main
strategies of research (also used by other, non-
Marxist commentators): structuralist, political/
economic and culturalist. The structuralist
approach examines the ideology embodied in
media content, concentrating on ‘text’ and the
source of the ideology. Th e political/economic
approach investigates the location of media
power within economic processes, and the
structure of media production. Th e culturalist
approach commences from the standpoint
that all societies are made up of a rich variety
of group cultures, but seeks to indicate that
some groups, therefore some cultures, receive a
disproportionate representation in the media in
the process of shaping and defi ning consensus
and obscuring the roots of genuine confl ict. See
functionalist/social action (modes of
media analysis); machinery of representa-
tion. See also topic guide under research
methods.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs According to
Abraham Maslow in his highly infl uential book,
Motivation and Personality (Harper & Row,
1954), human behaviour refl ects a range of basic
needs that form a hierarchy. ‘For the man who
is extremely and dangerously hungry,’ writes
Maslow, ‘no other interests exist but food.’ When
that need is satisfi ed, ‘new (and still higher) needs
emerge’. In what he terms a holistic-dynamic
theory of motivation, Maslow cites the follow-
ing basic needs: physiological needs; safety
needs; belongingness and loving needs; esteem