Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Ads?
I have to confess. I don't sleep well.
Come to find out lots of people don't sleep well.
In fact, there's an entire vertical around sleep, and people not sleeping well.
Mattresses, pillows and bedding, machines that make noise, machines that remove noise, products that make the room perfectly dark, products that give off soothing light...
It's crazy how many products there are about sleep.
You know what I love about all of this?
All of these sleep-related products come from marketers telling us we're supposed to sleep all night.
Turns out, it's not completely natural for all humans to sleep for eight hours a night. And two academics (in the 90s by Thomas Wehr, and in 2001, Roger Ekirch) show that it may actually be quite natural to be awake for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, sandwiched by two chunks of restful sleep.
And humans vary in this pattern by age and other life circumstances as well.
So here's the deal -- it's the mattress companies that want us to feel a deep need to sleep all night. We must buy their mattresses to fix what is essentially broken in us if we are to survive.
Horse hockey.
I know a lot of people (which is not great for an introvert like me, but whatever). And I've asked many of them. It turns out that most people don't sleep all night.
Not actually caring that my own study isn't scientific (I just talked with about 50 people about sleep over the past few years) I've come to a radical conclusion:
It's the mattress companies that perpetuate the myth of the sound and refreshing eight-hour night time nap.
And bully for them.
The mattress companies own President's Day, too. Who hasn't heard of the President's Day Mattress Sale?
Why is this great (and why am I devoting a whole email to this rant)?
Because the mattress industry is a $30 billion industry. And they hit us right where we live.
They've taken what's normal (not sleeping) and turned some big bucks from it.
They can get us to spend between $500 to $5000 (or much more) on a mattress. And they work really hard to get us to replace it every six to eight years.
I'll stop here with the dissecting. But we can dig deep into the very culture that the mattress industry has built to make us believe that we need to sleep on a cloud that must be replaced shortly after we bought it.
The good news in this charade is the diamonds (another marvel of marketing mayhem, by the way) available to study.
Now, before you go all wild about not having the advertising budget of a $30 billion industry, know this...
You don't need their budget to know exactly how to do what they've done (and avoid the mistakes they've made).
Even the small one- and two-person ecommerce stores can do the small town version of the mattress companies' takeover of the sleep space.
And you can do it for any product. As long as you tell good stories that lead people where they want to go.
And you won't have to make up fake science to make your point.
The mattress companies should be afraid of YOU when you learn how to do what they've done (but you'll do it properly).