Ch.6 Consumer Decision Making

Beats uses Need Recognition to advertise. They express that regular headphones don't have the quality sound like the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones.
---A marketing managers objective to get customers to recognize an imbalance between their present status and their preferred status.

External stimuli- design, brand name(dr.dre), headphones seen in music videos.

To get the people to see that the headphones are better quality, compare to the headphones they have now...

Internal Information Search-the person recalls information stored in memory.
Beats uses this to their advantage by letting people experience the difference in the quality of the sound. They have their headphones available in display at stores like Best Buy were u can listen to a sample of music with their headphones and with regular headphones. Even if you didn't go to the store to try out the headphones most people will stop and try it, the same way people stop to try the Apple products on display. People would look back and remember the difference and may want to go buy them.
(From personal experience, I tried the headphones a few years ago and will always remember that the sound from the Beats headphones sounded much better.)

External Information: info. from outside environment.
Non marketing controlled information is everywhere thanks to the Internet. There's plenty of blogs that share that Beats is more than just a brand name product , and that actually delivers it's objectives. There's also thousand of videos on YouTube, where people show off and review their new Beats headphones.

Examples:

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2008/09/monster-beats-by-dr-dre-the-definitive-review/

Beats also has marketing controlled information, also through YouTube, their own official website and other websites like Facebook. They have a Facebook page where they constantly update it's customers with information on their product, events and pictures.

Culture and social factors influence people to buy Dr.Dre headphones...

Music has become an essential factor of American culture. Music is available at all times and no matter where. Music is on tv, the Internet, mp3 players,iPods, and cell phones. Now all of these are combined into one (smartphone) so music is always with you. It is normal today to see a person walking around listening to music.
People are socially influenced by artist and celebrities that they listen to all the time. Beats recognizes this by not only advertising their headphones through music videos but by showing people that these artist they look up to, have bought these headphones and thus, their fans are influenced to buy them
Beats is also able to target specific people by designing headphones inspired by an artist and making them available to the public. For example, by launching the new JustBeats headphones inspired by Justin Bieber, they are able to target the millions of teenage girls who are fans of him.