The mattress category has witnessed tremendous action in recent times, mainly because of the many D2C brands that have made a beeline for it, following the US model.
But beyond the usual litany of product features and benefits, how can a mattress brand differentiate itself?
I had recently written about MattressFirm’s brilliant new idea that I also found to be questionable.
Interestingly, the Indian mattress brand WakeFit had copied an idea from MattressFirm too, in 2019! But this was more of a marketing strategy, not a brand positioning exercise.
Another mattress brand from India, The Sleep Company (TSC) has just launched its new marketing campaign starring Anil Kapoor (conceptualized and executed by the teams at The Sleep Company, brand studio Anomalous, and production house Another Idea). The highlight of the ad is a test: the raw egg test!
The ad has Anil Kapoor explaining that TSC’s patented SmartGRID mattresses are so good that when raw eggs, stuck to tempered glass, are pounded onto the mattress, they remain unbroken!
Here, watch the video!
This is an enormously interesting RTB (Reason To Believe; about which I had recently written) that seems like something outright convincing to a potential buyer.
The specific elements that go into shaping our thinking:
– The eggs don’t break – I know how fragile eggs are!
– If the eggs don’t break and the mattress absorbs the eggs being pounded at great speed, that means the mattress must be very soft and good!
And then there is replicability of the idea – if you order the mattress, you can test the raw egg experiment on your own and depending on your result, be impressed or disappointed.
As an idea, the ‘raw egg test’ is very intelligent and entertaining at the same time! It uses the power of self-demonstration to offer a semblance of proof (not actual proof) to potential buyers that something can be tested by ourselves and we can be convinced about some claim. To some extent, this is what Sebamed tried recently with their pH balance narrative, though access to pH strips to do the testing is not that simple/easy. Amul tried it very successfully with their war against all other butter cookies in India, in 2019.
But, it is not original, and already has 180 million+ views as an idea!
Yes! A direct competitor for The Sleep Company (but one that does not operate in India, yet) is a mattress brand called ‘Purple’ (based in Lehi, Utah, USA).
Purple first pioneered the ‘raw egg test’ as an entertaining marketing gimmick that is both engaging and supposedly explains the product benefit at the same time way back in April 2016. Watch!
They called it the Goldilocks video! If you remember your fairy tales, “Goldilocks lay down in the first bed (belonging to the bears), but it was too hard. Then she lay in the second bed, but it was too soft. Then she lay down in the third bed and it was just right“!
That video, which was shot very well, went massively viral in the US thanks to adept digital marketing by Purple’s Tony and Terry Pearce and their advertising agency, Harmon Brothers. The agency is known for hugely viral digital campaigns.
Subsequently, in 2018, Purple did a more ‘sciency’ variant of the ad too, showcasing the same test in a “lab-like” setting, far removed from the fairy tale setting.
Beyond the paid push given to the highly entertaining raw egg test Goldilocks video, Purple also got many online influencers to perform the raw egg test and add to the ‘third party views’ beside the brand’s views alone.
See:
It was all a big success and Purple did enormously well in terms of sales.
Now, The Sleep Company is following the exact same template, though they seem to have started the influencer-led raw egg tests before they announced the brand’s own, big-budget version!
They launched the raw egg test first in July 2019 as a small experiment and clearly unlike Purple’s first raw egg test that was given a lot of marketing push and a larger-than-life script.
From then, the brand has been floating the idea from time to time.
Then, the brand let the influencers do the test, just like how Purple did!
November 2019
November 2019
December 2019
March 2020
June 2021 (Bangla)
August 2021
The Sleep Company’s SmartGRID looks a lot like Purple’s GelFlex grids, so I actually thought that The Sleep Company is selling Purple’s mattresses legitimately in India. But I found out that the two companies have no connection, and yet The Sleep Company has appropriated two things from Purple – the ‘grid’ and the idea to market the mattresses using the raw egg test!
The ‘Grid’ used by Purple and The Sleep Company’s SmartGRID look exactly the same. Not just that, The Sleep Company even uses 2 GIFs to explain their grid and those 2 GIFs can be found on Purple’s website too!
One possible explanation could be that The Sleep Company got the rights to use Purple’s technology and launched it under their brand name in India. Or, both Purple and The Sleep Company have bought the rights to the grid technology from a third company and are using it for their respective markets.
But Purple talks extensively about their own technology and patents (a LOT of them)! And The Sleep Company talks about DRDO and ‘Japanese-sourced SmartGRID technology‘, muddling the origins of how they came about the grid idea (that looks so much like Purple’s grid).
Regardless of where each company got their technology from, the simple point, though, is about the marketing idea of using raw eggs to offer user-level demonstration to make some kind of proof. It seems unlikely that Purple copyrighted the marketing idea, but that doesn’t mean The Sleep Company can use the very same idea, to market a suspiciously similar product in the same category! Well, they can, of course, if Purple hasn’t copyrighted it… and they are 🙂 Legally, TSC is probably in the clear. Ethically, it’s a different matter altogether, unless they have sought permission from Purple and Harmon Brothers to reuse the idea, though that seems rather improbable given both companies are competitors.
And there’s no credit to either Purple or Harmon Brothers in the announcement by The Sleep Company.
It’s a fantastic marketing gimmick, however… something that can wow potential users and makes them consider the mattress seriously even though many, many reports have clearly mentioned that the raw egg test does not automatically mean that it is the right mattress for a person. But there is an innate ‘proof’ of sorts in that demonstration that makes people assume that because the eggs don’t break, there must be something worth considering in the mattress.