Sleep. For some people, it’s the drug of choice. For others, it’s a concession of weakness.
Everyone reading these words needs to sleep, regularly and comfortably. Mattress companies are well aware of this. The mattress industry is both crowded and competitive—and far more dynamic than you may have ever imagined.
Sealy, perhaps the most dominant brand in the mattress world, recently made headlines by adopting a technology that arch-rival competitor Simmons has been using for nearly one hundred years. Sealy has announced that they will manufacture mattresses with pocketed coils. Pocketed coils resemble the open coils that currently inhabit the center of every Sealy mattress, with the addition of a fabric sleeve surrounding each coiled wire. Purportedly, this will mean a better sleep experience for Sealy’s customers.
Simmons is crying foul, despite the fact that other mattress manufacturers have used similar technology for years. Gary Fazio, the chief executive of Simmons, asked of Sealy’s change, “Do you not have faith in the brand promise you’re making?”
Sealy doesn’t see the situation quite the same way. “Consumers could, really, to be honest, care less,” Jodi Allen, CMO of Sealy, said.
One of these people is right. The question is which one.
Brand Modeling Identifies Opportunities For Change
Sealy’s change does not, to all outside appearances, appear to be that ground-shaking. Yet history has proven, time and time again, that customers do not always welcome change. Even changes that appear to have no impact on the customer experience can not be received well. Changing a CEO, for example, would seem to mean little to the final customer—yet Apple‘s decision to let Steve Jobs go in favor of John Scully played out badly indeed. Apple loyalists rejoiced—and their numbers grew exponentially—after Jobs returned to the company.
On the other hand, failure to change can have catastrophic consequences as well. Henry Ford’s notorious reluctance to mess with the success of the Model A put Ford in a position where it was forced to catch up with the competition—who’d been happily experimenting, innovating, and profiting while Ford stood still.
What businesses need, more than anything, is a way to predict with a high degree of certainty, what aspects of their business are open to change. Equally important is the imperative to leave alone those elements of the business that the organization’s best customers hold in highest regard.
Harley Davidson, for example, knows full well that they can’t strip away the chrome, black leather, and the freedom of the open road from their brand. It would be brand suicide. Does that mean that the brand is locked in place, static and unable to evolve? Certainly not—but all forward motion must include, at its heart, those core elements—the Brand DNA—that attracts their best, most loyal customers in the first place.
What defines a Sealy mattress in the mind of the customer? We’d have to say we’re with Jodi Allen on this one. The qualities that a customer values the most when they’re selecting a mattress have little, if anything, to do with the actual construction or technology used and everything to do with the sleep experience they’re hoping to achieve. Whether the coils within the mattress have fabric wrapped around them is simply not something the vast majority of their best customers are likely to lose any sleep over.