Daily News Archive
Brought to you by Home Furnishings Business
50 Shades of Selling Beds
October 10,
2012 by in UnCategorized 
By Home Furnishings Business in on October 2012
Conventional wisdom on how to sell beds to consumers goes something like this:
¢ Sell to women; men dont make buying decisions about mattresses.
¢ Sell on price above all else.
¢ Never, ever mention what goes on in the bedroom besides sleep.
A discussion of mattress marketing strategies held at the Summer Las Vegas Market challenged those ideas, as a panel of bedding industry veterans offered fresh takes on such thoughts.
Interestingly, the panel was evenly split among the sexes, with Leggett & Platt Segment Vice President of Marketing Mark Quinn and Wright Global Graphics Chief Marketing Office Don Wright representing the male side, and Innovative Mattress Solutions CEO Kim Knopf and Comfort Solutions Senior Vice President of Marketing Cindy Williams of providing a female perspective.
The Other Thing We Do In Bed
Kicking off the session, moderator Julie Rosien, WithIt president and SocialNorth social media strategist, teased the elephant in the roomthe topic on everyones mind that some were reluctant to addressthe use of sex in marketing beds, or, as she put it in reference to the steamy bestseller, the whole 50 Shades conversation.
In Quinns view, the bedding industrys avoidance of using sex to market its products is a grievous error.
If you take any consumer productshoes, food, travel, cars, clothing, makeup, cologneevery category in the consumer products group uses sex to sell their product, Quinn said. Think about itevery single one of them. So then you have to ask yourself the question: Why? Because it sells product. So what kind of morons are we in this industryif anybody could own intimacy for sex, or talk about the fact that intimacy can in fact be better or enhanced or impacted by the product that you sell? And we choose not to say anything about it.
If you are a marketer from outside of our industry, and you look inside this industry, youd think How is it possible that no one in the mattress industry ever talks about intimacy? It is bizarre to me. ¦ Intimacy is awesome ¦ its a big part of life. So how is it that were not having the discussion?
Quinn said he realized this discussion has to be handled delicately, especially at the retail level.
Heres the trick, he said. Be careful how you have the conversation. You cant turn your sales associates loose and say, this bed is so much better for getting it on. So for Sealy, they led with it as a headline (Whatever you do in bed, Sealy supports it.) I dont know that I would do that. ¦ If I was a bedding manufacturer, I would absolutely have it as part of my Web site. You can have a discussion online.
Knopf echoed Quinns statements about the handling of this topic on the sales floor, saying I think from our perspective, on the retail floor, weve really tried to steer away from those conversations because it can be very awkward. Thats just been our philosophy for 30 years, so when Sealy had those commercials we opted not to run the real risqué one.
Gender Bias?
The panel also challenged the bedding industrys typical skewing of its marketing efforts toward women.
My concern is that weve gone so far with the female audienceI get that, we need to listen to her, because women make a majority of decisions in the household, Quinn said. The weird thing about beds is that guys use them too. People in marketing want to talk about her. I get that. ¦ But we ignore the male opinion. If we continue to keep them out of the discussion, we keep them out of the shopping experience. We dont think about things that are relevant to men, like technology ¦ Get a guy in your store and start talking to him about technology in the bed, youve got him. You give him a remote control to play with, he may just be the guy who makes the decision on the productand he might make a high-price decision. Its not about he and she as much as it is about sleep.
Wright, whose firm specializes in designing graphics for bedding industry promotions and point-of-sale, offered his perspective on the role of gender in the industrys visual imagery. A lot of the graphics, he said, 80 percent of the time, its a woman sleeping on the product. Its not a guy. You get couples sometimes. ¦ I think that the common language is, youre selling sleep. I think we all have the same issues.
Williams advised bedding retailers to use great sensitivity in their dealings with female consumers: Some women are more comfortable having a woman wait on them, especially if they have to lay down on a mattress, because sometimes its a real compromising position.
Focus on Sleep
A common point made by the panelists was a need in the industry to continue to emphasize sleep and comfortbenefits everyone can appreciaterather than price.
The (bedding) products today really are catering to some of the issues people face at night, Knopf said, i.e., all this technology around the gel. Body temperature is a huge issue in terms of how fast people go to sleep and whether they sleep all night long. ¦ Motion separation, if you get woken up by your partner. ¦ I think that todays products have been engineered to address a lot of those issues. HFB