Month: January 2011

A powerful entity that affects our purchasing behavior are social reference groups. Specifically, I will be talking about the indirect aspirational ones. Aspirational social groups are the ones that consumers look up too and try to mimic. So that is why some companies try to associate their products with aspirational groups to increase their sales.

The product that I have in mind that seems to intensely uses this tactic, of associating their product with celebrities, to increase profits is Beats by Dr.Dre. The marketing division that is in charge of promoting these Beats products seem to focus on trying to get their product associated with many big name celebrities specifically musicians, as headphones  are closely related to music. Although interestingly, Beats does not only limit the association of their products to musicians, as they are more than eager to associate their product to any celebrity such as athletes. So how exactly does Beats get themselves associated with big names. On the Beats by Dr.Dre website their is a page that is specifically shows their product being used by various celebrities http://beatsbydre.com/picsvids/Pictures.aspx. Another way of having their product associated with celebrities is that they have their product promoted in music videos .

But is this tactic of  using reference groups actually a very effective method of increasing sales? On the other side of the headphones market is Bose. For me I do not see many celebrities or musicians  actively promoting Bose products, although Bose is still predominately in the headphone market. So this leaves us with the question of: will Beats be able to overtake Bose in the headphone market.

It was briefly mentioned in our textbook, and it really got me thinking. What I am talking about is, how companies through marketing are able to seemingly differentiate a relatively similar commodity/good. One prime example would be bottled water; how is it that companies such as Evian, Perrier and Nestle are able to make people believe that their water is better than tap water and superior to their competitors.

So I started to look around Youtube, in search of finding some water commercials and seeing how water bottle companies were branding their bottle water. But instead of finding a water commercial, I found this video clip which I believe to be very informative After watching this video, I looked back onto how my family began buying bottle water instead of drinking tap water. The reason was due to the fact my parents started to believe that tap water was dirty because there were a couple of cases that popped up saying that some people got ill from drinking tap water. So now that I think about this, I start to wonder if it was possible that water bottling companies were the ones behind blowing up these news stories, which, if were true, seems to come into some ethical issues.

In the end the video mentions that the “bottle water fad” is fading fast because people are becoming “greener”, this is an example of a social trend that these companies need to pay very close attention to. And I do believe that some companies have already recognized this and tried to differentiate themselves in an alternative way, which is they are trying to seem more Eco-friendly or more socially responsible. For example Ethos Water is selling themselves as a brand that supports third world countries in getting access to clean water.

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