Different States of Market Demand
When we think about “demand” for a product, it’s tempting to picture a single dial that just goes from low to high. More demand is good, less demand is bad, and our job as marketers is to push the dial up. That’s not really how it works, though.
Marketing scholar Philip Kotler argued that demand actually shows up in several distinct states, and each one calls for a completely different marketing response. Some of these states genuinely need us to reduce demand, not increase it, which sounds strange until we walk through why.
We’re going to work through all eight of these states, because seeing them side by side is what makes the framework useful. On their own, each state might seem obvious. Together, they show us that “grow demand” is not always the marketing task in front of us.
Quick Definitions
- Negative demand
Most of the market actively dislikes or avoids the product (sometimes even paying to avoid it). The response is conversional marketing: research the objections and redesign the offer or message to overcome resistance. - No demand
People are indifferent or unaware of the product; they simply don’t see it as relevant. The response is stimulational marketing: link the product to existing needs or interests and build awareness from a blank slate. - Latent demand
A strong shared need exists, but no product on the market yet satisfies it properly. The response is developmental marketing: measure the unmet need and create a product that actually meets it. - Faltering (declining) demand
Sales are falling compared with previous levels. The response is remarketing: diagnose the cause and either reverse the decline through repositioning or features, or manage an orderly exit if the decline is structural. - Irregular demand
Demand fluctuates sharply by season, day, or hour, creating operational problems. The response is synchromarketing: smooth the peaks and troughs through pricing, promotions, or alternative uses so supply and demand align better over time. - Full demand
Current demand matches the company’s ability to supply profitably and the firm is satisfied with the level. The response is maintenance marketing: protect quality, watch competitors, and fine-tune pricing to keep the balance. - Overfull demand
More people want the product than the company can supply at current capacity or price. The response is demarketing: deliberately reduce or redirect demand (higher prices, limited advertising, timed access) so quality and experience are preserved. - Unwholesome demand
Real demand exists for products that society or public-health authorities want to discourage (cigarettes, excess gambling, etc.). The response is countermarketing: reduce overall demand through education, restrictions, warnings, or taxation.
Quick Examples
- Negative: dental treatment
- Nonexistent: a new technology people do not yet understand
- Latent: consumers wanting a solution that does not yet exist
- Declining: printed newspapers
- Irregular: hotels in an off-season
- Full: a restaurant consistently operating at its ideal capacity
- Overfull: a tourist destination suffering from overcrowding
- Unwholesome: cigarettes
What Happens When People Actively Dislike What We’re Selling?
This is negative demand: most of the market not only doesn’t want the product, they actively avoid it, sometimes to the point of paying to avoid it. Think about vaccinations for a lot of people, or dental work, or life insurance before anyone’s given it much thought. Nobody is excited to buy these.
The marketing task here is called conversional marketing, and it’s about figuring out why people resist and then trying to change that. This usually means research into the actual objections (is it fear, cost, inconvenience, a bad past experience?), followed by redesigning the offer or the message to address that specific resistance. A dentist’s office that focuses its marketing on painless procedures and a calm environment is doing conversional marketing. They’re not just advertising harder, they’re addressing the actual reason people avoid the category.
What About When People Don’t Even Know They Might Want It?
No demand is different from negative demand. Here, people aren’t against the product, they’re just indifferent or unaware. They don’t see the product as relevant to them at all.
This is common with genuinely new inventions. When a new type of home device or a new health product shows up, most consumers have no opinion on it yet because they’ve never thought about the need it fills. The marketing task, stimulational marketing, is about connecting the product to needs or interests people already have. We’re not fighting resistance the way we are with negative demand. We’re building awareness from a blank slate.
What If There’s a Need Nobody Has Actually Filled Yet?
Latent demand is when a lot of people share a strong need, but no product on the market properly satisfies it yet. Kotler’s classic example was the demand for safer cigarettes: plenty of smokers wanted a less harmful version, but for years nothing on the market delivered that.
A more recent example is plant-based meat before products like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods existed in any serious way. There was a real, sizeable group of people who wanted something that looked, cooked, and tasted like meat without being meat. The demand was there; the product wasn’t. The marketing task is developmental marketing: measuring the size of that unmet need and developing something that actually meets it. This is where product development and marketing overlap heavily, since you can’t market your way out of latent demand without eventually building the thing people are waiting for.
What Happens When Demand Used to Be There, But Isn’t Anymore?
This is faltering, or declining, demand: sales that are dropping compared to where they used to be. Landline telephones are an easy example. Department stores in a lot of markets have seen this too, as shopping habits shifted toward online and toward more specialized retail formats.
The task here is remarketing, and it starts with a hard question: why is this happening, and can we actually reverse it? Sometimes the answer is repositioning the product for a different audience or a different use case.
Sometimes it’s adding features or bundling with something more current. And sometimes, honestly, the answer is that decline is structural (the market has genuinely moved on) and the better decision is a managed exit rather than pouring money into propping the product up. Recognizing which situation you’re in matters a lot, because fighting a structural decline with more advertising spend usually just burns money without changing the underlying trend.
What If Demand Just Isn’t Steady?
Irregular demand is when sales swing up and down, by season, by day of the week, or even by hour, in a way that creates real operational problems. Ski resorts are busy in winter and nearly empty in summer. Gyms get packed in January and quiet down by March. Ride-sharing apps see huge spikes at closing time on a Friday night and much less demand at 10am on a Tuesday.
The task is synchromarketing: trying to smooth out these peaks and troughs so the business runs more efficiently. This might mean off-season pricing (a ski resort marketing itself as a summer hiking destination), flexible pricing that discourages demand at peak times and encourages it at quiet times (surge pricing works both ways, in theory), or promotions timed specifically to fill the gaps. The goal isn’t to change total demand necessarily, it’s to move some of it around so supply and demand line up better across the year or the day.
What Does “Just Right” Demand Look Like?
Full demand is the state every business actually wants to be in most of the time: current demand matches what the company can profitably supply, and the company is happy with its sales level.
This sounds simple, but it’s not passive. The task here, maintenance marketing, is about holding that position: keeping quality consistent, watching for competitors who might chip away at your customers, and adjusting pricing carefully so you don’t accidentally push demand out of balance in either direction. A lot of mature, well-run brands spend most of their time in maintenance marketing, and the discipline required to stay there gets underrated because it doesn’t look as dramatic as launching something new.
Can There Be Too Much Demand?
Yes, and this is overfull demand: more people want the product than the company can supply, at least at the current price or capacity. A popular restaurant that can’t seat everyone who wants a table on a Saturday night is dealing with overfull demand. So is a national park during peak season, or a concert that could sell out five times over.
The task here is demarketing, and it genuinely means trying to reduce demand, or at least redirect it, rather than chase it. That might sound backwards for a marketer to be doing, but think about what happens if we don’t: overcrowding damages the experience for everyone, service quality drops, and in some cases (a national park, a popular hiking trail) the product itself gets physically damaged by overuse.
Demarketing tools include raising prices, cutting back advertising, timed ticketing, or shifting some demand to a less busy time or location. We’re not trying to kill demand permanently, usually, just bring it back down to a level we can actually deliver on well.
What About Demand We’d Rather Not Have at All?
Unwholesome demand is different from the other seven states, because here the concern isn’t about matching supply and demand at all. It’s about products that generate real demand, but that society (or public health authorities, or the company itself) wants to discourage: cigarettes, hard drugs, gambling in excess.
The task, countermarketing, tries to reduce demand for the product entirely, often through public health campaigns, warning labels, restrictions on advertising, or taxation designed to discourage consumption. This one sits slightly outside typical brand marketing, since it’s often government agencies or public health bodies doing the countermarketing against a private company’s product, rather than a company doing it to itself. But it’s worth including because it shows demand management isn’t only about a company’s own goals. Sometimes the wider question is whether a type of demand should be encouraged at all.
What Does This Mean for a Marketer Making Decisions?
The real value of this framework isn’t the list itself, it’s what it forces us to ask before we act: which state are we actually in right now, and does that match the state we assumed we were in?
A lot of marketing mistakes come from misdiagnosing the state. If we treat overfull demand like it’s full demand, and just keep advertising and taking orders, we end up overpromising on delivery times, frustrating customers, and damaging the brand, when the better move might have been to slow down and manage the flow instead. If we treat faltering demand like it’s irregular demand (assuming sales will bounce back naturally once the season changes), we might miss a genuine structural decline until it’s too late to reposition the product properly.
Forecasting also depends heavily on getting the state right. A company planning production, staffing, or inventory needs a realistic read on whether current demand reflects a temporary blip (irregular demand) or a lasting shift (faltering demand). Get that wrong and we either overinvest in capacity nobody needs or underinvest and disappoint customers we could have served.
And there’s a broader lesson in here about what marketing is actually for. Most marketing courses focus on how to build demand, and that’s a fair emphasis since building demand is what most companies need most of the time. But this framework is a reminder that occasionally the job is to slow demand down, redirect it, or even work to eliminate it, and a marketer who only knows how to press the accelerator is going to struggle the moment the situation calls for something else.
Key Points to Take Away
- Demand isn’t just high or low. Kotler identified eight distinct states, each calling for a different marketing response.
- Negative demand and no demand both need different tools: conversional marketing addresses active resistance, while stimulational marketing builds awareness from indifference.
- Latent demand (a real unmet need with no product yet) requires developmental marketing, which usually means product development, not just advertising.
- Faltering and irregular demand look similar on the surface but need different responses: remarketing tries to reverse a genuine decline, while synchromarketing smooths out predictable ups and downs.
- Overfull demand is a real problem, not a good one, and demarketing (raising prices, limiting availability, redirecting demand) is often the right response.
- Before choosing a marketing response, correctly diagnosing which demand state you’re actually in matters more than the response itself.
