November 3, 2021
Iris Mohr, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair of Marketing, has won the Association for Consumer Research’s Best Videography Award Manhattan for her film, “Spring Chronicle: The Untold Maslow Story of COVID-19.” The Award recognizes the quality of the submission to the conference based on reviewer scores and comments and the Association’s own estimation of quality and merit.
The award was announced at the ACR2021 Conference in Seattle on Oct. 30.
The film takes place in New York City during Spring 2020, from the start of the pandemic through June, and captures the daily lives of people during the pandemic and the events that unfolded at the time.
An unexpected outcome of the Covid-19 lockdown and the pandemic is that it taught people for the first time about Abraham H. Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” starting with our very basic need for food, warmth, shelter, and safety, and raised awareness of the necessity for the very basic things in life that matter. As the Maslovian hierarchy of needs is reflected on, the film seeks to answer through observation and media footage whether the theory holds up considering the pandemic.
“The film suggests that Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid is problematic, since not everyone will move through the hierarchy in a single direction but may move back and forth between the different types of needs. As we move up the hierarchy to needs for security and shelter, social belonging, to ultimately actualization of human potential, the hierarchy is influenced by areas of psychology, sociology, economics, technology, and politics,” said Mohr.
“The motivations of people as they react to Covid-19 can further arise from the level of an individual, the group, family, community, organization, and politics, which suggests that the order of needs may vary in societies and cultures worldwide, and these levels of needs are continuously overlapping each other,” she added. “This means that the lower levels may take precedence over other tiers at any point in time. Therefore, while consumer behavior is influenced by motivation, and there will always be some hierarchy of needs, the reality is that it might not be the way Maslow theorized that people must fulfill their needs.”
This recognition is one more for Mohr’s already impressive trophy case. Her inaugural film, #SustainUp, won many accolades upon its release in 2018, including an Impact DOCS Award of Recognition and a nomination for the Women Film Critics Circle Award. It was also made an official selection of many film festivals around the world.