McGuire's Psychological Motivations

McGuire's Psychological Motivations (or Motives) is a classification system where human consumption motives have been organized into 16 categories. This categorization helps marketing experts isolate the motives that might be involved in the consumption of sales goods. There are several subdivisions of this charting - such as whether motives are affective or cognitive or whether they involve status growth or status preservation.

There are four main categories of motivations that each have four sub-categories: cognitive preservation motives (consistency, causation, categorization, cues), cognitive growth motives (independence, novelty, teleological, utilitarian), affective preservation motives (tension reduction, self-expression, ego defense. reinforcement), and affective growth motives (assertion, affiliation, identification, modeling).