Disruption between the sheets

Originally shared via Mumbrella

In just under a decade, the bed-in-a-box concept has disrupted an entire industry and revolutionised how people buy mattresses. Leaning into behavioural biases was a significant factor in its success, according to Dan Monheit, CEO of Hardhat.

Bed. Where we end and start the day. The place of dreams, yet, if you choose the wrong mattress, it can be the stuff of nightmares. Sleep has become a precious commodity. The world has suddenly woken up to the critical role sleep plays in our lives, with benefits that span our physical health, mental well-being, brain function, and immunity.

The seven to nine hours (if you’re smart) we spend asleep per night dictates the rest of our waking hours. So traditionally, buying a bed has been a high-risk, high-involvement, high-investment category for most. In our attempts to get it right, we used to think nothing of heading into a store, hopping from one bed to the next until we’d found our version of bedtime nirvana. Therefore, if you’d been pitching startup ideas a decade ago, trying to convince investors of the categories that would make a smooth transition to e-commerce, mattresses would have been close to the bottom of the list.

This makes it all the more astonishing that it’s been less than a decade since Caspar Sleep, the US-based bed-in-a-box pioneer, started selling latex and memory foam mattresses online. In just nine years, buying a mattress unseen on the internet has gone from the stuff of dreams to accounting for around one in every ten transactions.

The mattress-in-a-box industry has inadvertently delivered a masterclass in using Behavioural Science to change consumer behaviour. Without the luxury of physical stores, the likes of Sleeping Duck, Emma, Koala and Ecosa have found a way to not just derisk themselves in the minds of consumers but to establish themselves as the safest choice of all.

So, how did they do it?

Zeroing out the risk

Even if you’ve flopped on and off every bed, in every store, in every shopping centre within a ten-kilometre radius of your home, there’s still a risk that once you get it home and hit the hay, you’ll have a change of heart. Understandably, this risk feels significantly higher with a mattress you’ve never seen in 3D, let alone awkwardly napped on in a showroom.

Enter the bed-in-a-box industry standard of a 100-night sleep guarantee, a concept previously unheard of in the physical bed retailing world. Shop online, buy today, sleep on it for three months, and if you don’t like it after that, just send it back for a full refund.

This notion plays directly into Zero Risk Bias, our tendency to favour options that completely eliminate one type of risk, even if, objectively speaking, it’s not the best option for us. In the game of sales, any reduction in risk is good, but the complete removal of risk is disproportionately good.

Ultimately, it comes down to wanting one less thing to worry about. Picking an option that brings a degree of certainty frees up our cognitive energy to spend on other, more important things.

Money-back guarantees are a sales technique as old as time. Not only do they work in the moment, but in reality, they’re rarely called in after the fact. Bed-in-a-box retailers know that by the time a customer has set up their new bed and slept in it for three months, any fears they had at the moment of purchase will have long since dissipated. They also know that the pain of returning the mattress and starting the buying process from scratch is usually just too much to bare.

Good sleep? Show me the proof.

According to research by the Better Sleep Organisation, about half of all mattress shoppers search for and read online reviews across three to four different review websites during their purchasing journey. As powerful as heritage brands are, Social Proof can be more potent.

Social Proof was coined by the leading social scientist in the field of influence, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini defined this cognitive bias as “People doing what they observe other people doing”.

Marketers tap into Social Proof when they show potential customers that people just like them are already doing the thing they’re being asked to do. Social Proof touches the deep, psychological wiring within us that says it’s safer to be with others and can be an especially effective tool for unfamiliar, infrequent or high-risk purchases. Buying a new mattress, which is important, expensive and only happens once every eight years or so, fits the bill perfectly.

Walking into a bustling, physical bed store is one thing, but seeing that the mattress you’re thinking about buying already has over 12,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 stars is quite another. It’s not surprising then, that prominent ratings and reviews, both at a brand and product level have become the mainstay for bed-in-a-box disruptors.

Becoming ‘the’ authority

The bed-in-a-box category is built on another super-effective marketing strategy that leverages Authority Bias. This cognitive bias is why we have an irrational trust in the judgement of experts. Our brains use Authority Bias as a shortcut to save time and energy in making decisions. Marketers have leveraged it since the 1930s after convincing doctors to endorse cigarettes! Now it’s dentists and toothbrushes, racing car drivers and petrol, athletes and sportswear, the list goes on.

Bed-in-a-box brands lean directly into Authority Bias in a number of ways. First is the seemingly mandatory, highly detailed descriptions of all the scientific research and innovation baked into every new-age mattress. Often, these breakthroughs are substantiated by founders with impressive credentials, including aeronautical engineering in the case of Sleeping Duck.

Next up is awards. Like wine and cars, the mattress category has spawned enough awards to ensure everybody gets one. Whether it’s peoples’ choice, five-star innovation, outstanding customer service or best design, every online retailer has something that proves somebody of some authority said they were excellent.

However, while some are credible, others are not. Often you have to wade through comparison sites that individually rate mattresses, but be sure to wear your glasses to read the small print as often these sites are owned by the brand that just happened to come in as the first choice.

Beautiful websites, deeply considered customer journeys, and highly optimised ad spends have seen the bed-in-a-box category achieve the impossible. While there will no doubt be consolidation among the dozens of plucky brands in the coming months and years, together, they’ve irreversibly changed the experience – and the expectation – of a whole generation of bed-buying consumers.