ABSTRACT
Virtually every introductory textbook for university programs in advertising, public relations, or marketing describes a model of innate human needs that first appeared in a 1943 psychology journal article titled, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” often reproducing a pyramid-shaped chart illustrating each need as occupying a distinct level. Yet, despite many instructors’ unquestioning acceptance of this theory as something important enough to place on exams, the ubiquitous content contains inescapable self-contradictions that should be readily evident to anyone more perspicacious than a member of the Flat Earth Society. Within the space of a single page of the textbook I now use for a course devoted to the marketing and advertising theories of the field known as “consumer behavior,” it asserts (as do books by many other authors):
1. “The [model] appears to be closely bound to contemporary American culture,” with citations from management journal articles from the 1970s, or, at latest, a quarter of a century ago (e.g., Hofstede, 1984, who also called the model “ethnocentric”).
