Mattress Marketing Explained. Woman laying on a cloud.

Mattress Marketing Explained – Here’s Why We Call BS!

July 17, 2018
Industry News & Alerts

Beds In Boxes, Wondered What It’s Like To Sleep On A Cloud? Mattress marketing explains A lot about why this is a thing.

Well you can’t, and no one has ever done it, yet mattress makers won’t stop advertising false illusions of cloud-like mattresses to the people who frankly haven’t given the concept of a puffy cloud-like mattress a second of thought. Mattress buyers lets consider this from the perspective of skydiver jumping out of a plane.

Do free fallers experience a cloud like experience? Perhaps, but I’m fairly certain it won’t feel anything like a mattress.

In fact, most normal people, I included would consider this so-called “cloud-like experience” more of a nightmare. So, if we were to describe the cloud-like experience logically it would be more like falling through a cloud at terminal velocity at speeds reaching (200 miles/hour) – and yes sometimes even more than that.

Still thinking you want a cloudlike mattress experience? #BSMattressIndustryMarketing

It’s Okay To Sit On My Bed, Right? Will It Hurt It?

This is an interesting question because many of you and myself included grew up in a time when sitting on your bed was considered a great big no-no. In fact, neither my mom nor grandmother allowed me to sit or play on our beds. At that time this was also the industry mantra of a more conscientious mattress industry that said it was bad and strongly recommended against it.

They even went so far as to reinforce side edges and the middle where body weight would be the greatest. It was obvious to all of them why sitting on mattresses would accelerate mattress breakdown.

I know in my case family didn’t allow it because using a mattress in place of a chair would break it down faster. Both the industry leaders and our family elders were right and knew this as a fact. Add in that today’s mattress quality and durability are but a fraction of their predecessors and you begin to understand the problem mattress buyers unknowingly face.

On top of all that, manufacturers have done an about-face and now go so far as to encourage us to sit on our beds. They do this through aggressively promoted ads marketing expensive power-adjustable bed bases. Look no further than the preset remote control found on virtually all models.

Features Include:

  • TV Position
  • Lounge Position
  • Zero Gravity Positions

The mattress industry gets to sell you a brand new one when yours prematurely breaks down due to heavy use from weight concentration which mattresses weren’t designed for.

It’s unfortunate but just like the cloudlike feeling mattresses I just spoke of, average customers are buying into to the idea that it’s okay to sit and use our beds like a chair which brings us full circle to big mattresses stuffed in tiny boxes.

What Does All Of This Have To Do With New Mattresses Crammed And Shipped In Small Boxes?

We should all be skeptical of #BSMattressIndustryMarketing and throughout this article, we’ve learned mattress manufacturers manipulate facts and tell us what we want to hear and what they want us to hear. They feed us lines like “Mattresses feel like clouds” and “it’s okay to sit on your bed.” Now mattress builders want us to believe that putting a mattress inside of a very small box is okay too.

Should we trust the conniving mattress marketing machine? While this industry is my family, sometimes family needs to be set straight. It is very clear to me and safe to say that lining a bed builder’s pockets seems to be more important and comes all too often before quality, support, durability, comfort, and yes, and most importantly honesty.

For over 100 years established brand names like Sealy, Serta, and Simmons dominated mattress sales. Like Rome, each had their day in the sun and ruled the mattress world. Now thanks to companies like Casper, Amazon, Bed in Box, and others the winds of change are upon us. Whether that is good or bad has yet to be seen. These major players and others have outshined, simplified, and made mattress shopping “easy”, but at what price? They’ve taken advantage of marketing convenience and the ease of the Internet.

What Did They Do That Is So Different

What did they do that is so different? One of the key issues is that they got creative as to dealing with the exorbitant cost of shipping. When a giant mattress the size of a bedroom must be delivered, what’s a manufacturer to do? Well, they can ship it for 200.00-400.00 or come up with an idea to ship it across the country that won’t hurt their bottom line.

Bed builders and giant online retailers quickly figured out how to make a queen-size mattress measuring 60” x 80” x 10” fit inside of a tiny box that can be “easily shipped” via UPS or Fed Ex. Roll packing and compressing mattresses became the economical way to move a mattress across the country. As an example, a queen mattress used to ship in a box that cost 20-25 dollars and measured 82 x 62 x 15. Today most queen-sized mattresses are now shipped in boxes that cost less than 10.00 and measure approximately 15 x 15 x 46.

That’s a huge savings for bed builders that ultimately ends up costing mattresses buyers big time in the end.

How? Automatic Mattress Packaging with Compression, Single Fold & Roll Packing is the industry answer.

Videos On Automatic Mattress Packaging With Compression

In Summary

We would like you to keep in mind what mattress makers (and moms) have said for over a century about sitting on a bed. Now that it’s convenient and more profitable for them these bed builders it’s suddenly become okay to smash your new mattress with a vice, vacuum pack it, fold/Roll and shove it in a box for potentially months at a time.

The fact is, this is damaging the various layers of foam and their air cell structure. We simply can’t understand how forcing such a large product inside such a tiny box for so long has zero effect on durability, comfort, etc. Add in the fact how poorly most of these mattresses perform in ordinary everyday use i.e. Body impressions, mattress sagging, mattress hammocking.

When you do your research, you find that these are common mattress durability issues with established brand names. It’s easy to understand the concerns of mattress newcomers that use the very same foams and haven’t been around more than a handful of years. This really makes it hard for these new comers to back up their claims of long term durability.

I am sure I will be called out and ostracized, but what do I know, I am only a 32 year veteran mattress retailer? I, for one, have not bought into the advertising machine that is the mattress industry. I wouldn’t personally own one of these mattresses for myself, but I will sell them like everyone else to stay relevant, current and in the mattress game. I have shared my opinion and while it may be out of the industry norm I think this opinion carries merit and a lot of weight.

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