12A Figuring Out Buyer Behavior

My segment:
Individuals who need sleep aid via white noise who are not necessarily interested in the environment, but more so the segment focused on saving money. Now that I have found a way to include a volume control of sorts into my product by simply adding or subtracting beads from the fan blades, I chose to interview parents of a newborn, a college student who needs white noise to sleep, and a father who owns a house full of young kids who all use a speaker/iPod combination to play white noise at night.

My findings:
Due to the fact that often a baby can add on many expenses to a family, parents of newborns may need an inexpensive way to help the baby sleep a fuller night. I found out that many parenting books and websites online recommend a white noise machine if the baby is struggling to sleep at night because apparently the white noise mimics the sound of the womb and puts the baby to sleep. These parents had searched for ways to help infants fall asleep at night and also looked through parenting books and consulted other parents about this product. Due to not having a spare phone to put in the baby's room, this means families would have to invest in an iPod and speaker for this room, which can get expensive when added to the other costs of having a baby. Marketing this product as being an inexpensive way to help babies sleep at night may help to reach consumers like this by having baby books and other infant related websites write about my product.

I thought that the college student using her phone to sleep at night would be very interested in a way of saving money on her method of producing white noise due to college students having a limited budget. However, she said that she has roommates so she does not see the full impact of using her phone on her electricity bill since it is split four ways. She felt a solar powered fan might be too expensive for her to invest in over the slight increase in her electricity bill she personally sees from using her phone. After being unable to sleep for a while and realizing it wasn't just one night of not being able to sleep, and after noticing an important exam was approaching, she had looked on various websites and read that listening to white noise often helps people, and as a result just uses free videos online to play while she sleeps. She said after trying it for one night and finding it made a big difference, she began doing it every night and it definitely helped. So for people her age, the focus would be on websites and trial programs to convince individuals it is worth the investment.

The father of young girls who use iPods and speakers to play white noise every night said that he has spent so much on the systems for each room and the electricity bill that he would love to try a less expensive alternative, as long as it was still effective in helping his kids sleep. He said his family uses these machines because they bought them when the kids were babies to help them sleep through the night, but now the kids are used to the noise and have continued to use the machines up through age 16. So initially the family found information about these machines through baby books and websites recommending white noise for sleep aid and then just continued using these systems for the other two children because it worked for the oldest. This surprised me because I was expecting the need awareness to be recognized later in the children's lives and therefore discovered through a different information search. I was not expecting the same path as the parent's of the new born. But this did help me to see that users of this product would continue to use it for a very long time and would continue to buy new products for new generations if it was effective when trying it for the first time themselves so again some kind of trial test option would also be helpful here.

Conclusion:
This segment all looked online and at different websites before deciding which machines to get or which videos to play at night, and also used websites to determine if white noise was truly an effective sleep aid option. Another big part of the information search was baby books and parenting websites. Parents often end up searching for the information on behalf of their children by checking parenting websites and books which is how most of these families discover the effectiveness of white noise as a sleep aid. The need assessment was noticing a lack of sleep in oneself, or noticing the lack of sleep of their children. The information search was a culmination of determining the most effective sleep aid, but also the one that would not be too expensive to implement/try out.