As the world's largest mattress market, the United States relies on physical store chains for development. However, due to the purchase experience of traditional mattresses, consumers suffer from difficult choices and cumbersome return and exchange. In addition, as a low-frequency category, mattresses will not be repurchased until three or four years on average.
Starting in 2018, Mattress Firm, an American mattress retailer, officially went bankrupt, marking that online mattress retailers have successfully occupied the traditional retail market. It also stimulated a large number of retailers to join the mattress industry. In fact, as early as 2017, retail giant Wal-Mart has joined the mattress industry and launched its own bedding brand and mattress. Online giant Amazon has also begun selling memory foam mattresses under the Rivet brand.
With the gradual elimination of traditional retail giants, some emerging brands quickly occupy the online mattress retail market. Among them, the Internet-based mattress brand Casper has grown rapidly.
Casper brand products are mainly produced and sold in the United States, and are sold in more than 200 retail stores and online in all states of the United States. Sleep-related products, mainly mattresses, are deeply loved by consumers. The biggest innovation in the industry is to promise consumers 100 days of free return and exchange of products, and the mattresses received by consumers are packed in refrigerator-sized boxes for distribution, which greatly reduces transportation costs.
The Casper brand, established in 2014, is now valued at US$1.1 billion. How did Casper use its super product strategy to start from mattresses and successfully enter the medical device field of the "sleep economy".
01
Casper's past and present
Find user pain points
Before creating the Casper brand, its founder Philip Krim and his friends worked in a shared office in New York. They accidentally observed that colleagues at work often dozed off, relying on a lot of coffee to stay awake and improve work efficiency.
Philip Krim, who has many years of experience in the mattress industry, believes that the reason why people do not pay attention to sleep problems is most likely because they did not choose the right mattress.
Therefore, Philip Krim pulled his friends Jeff Chapin, Neil Parikh, Gabriel Flateman, and T. Luke Sherwin through a long period of insights and confirmed his guesses, thus starting his own business and opening a new new mattress retail model. Solve the pain points of the mattress industry.
After Casper was established in 2014, the initial idea was to design different mattresses to meet different consumers. However, after insight into user needs, I found that only one mattress can satisfy different consumers, and it also helps Consumers made a quick decision. After the product went on the market, sales reached US$1 million in less than a month, and it began to sell to Canada.
02
How Casper builds super products
Focus on one product
As a product manager, Jeff Chapin, one of the founders of the Casper brand, believes that focusing on a product for product innovation is the core value of the brand. Therefore, it took one and a half years to sample and test the product, and it took more than 70,000 prototypes to confirm the birth of the final product.
First of all, in terms of products, Casper's mattress uses multiple layers of foam. In order to make the mattress comfortable enough, the product manager fuses the latex foam on the top of the mattress with the memory foam in the middle. This approach is a major innovation in mattress products, so the company has also applied for a patent.
The fusion of the two different foams ensures the softness of the product and guarantees that users can support from different angles during sleep, and they will not feel hot when they sleep, creating a comfortable sleeping experience for users.
In the product production process, we choose local American manufacturers to control every link of the supply chain to ensure product quality.
Then through the innovation of new products, collecting feedback from users, iterating the mattresses, enhancing the functionality of the products, thus creating the birth of super products.
03
Casper's retention of users
Increase user stickiness
Casper provides users with not only comfort, but also a price lower than traditional mattresses. Consumers of Casper only need to spend one third of the price of traditional mattresses to enjoy comfortable and high-quality mattresses. The principle of developing products is as important as user experience.
90% of mattress consumers will choose to go to a physical store to experience the comfort of the mattress in person. However, because the traditional price is relatively expensive and there is no physical showroom, it is difficult for consumers to have confidence in the product. In addition, after buying the mattress home, Those traditional retailers do not provide return and exchange guarantees, and the expensive round-trip shipping is a headache for users.
Casper is to reshape the user's shopping experience through online shopping channels. First of all, the choice of a mattress can reduce the "difficulty of choice" caused by users due to excessive choices.
Secondly, after providing users with 100 days of free return and sales, consumers do not need to bear any costs, and those returned mattresses will not be sold again, but directly donated to local charities.
Not only that, users can also enjoy a 10-year warranty. In order to make users trust the product, the process information such as product raw materials written on the official website of Casper is presented in a simple and understandable way.
On the one hand, it shows that the product quality is excellent, and on the other hand, it increases users' confidence in the product, which effectively stimulates users' desire to buy and increases user stickiness to a certain extent.
04
Casper's marketing plan
Proper marketing helps the birth of super products
In order to be able to reach more consumers, Casper has opened more than a dozen pop-up stores across the United States, allowing brands to directly interact with consumers. For Casper, pop-up stores can ease consumers’ concerns about buying mattresses online. Worry, buying, receiving, and returning products have been simplified and will not affect online sales.
In the process of brand development, Casper transformed from the mattress industry to a participant in the "sleep economy" and proposed the concept of "sleep arc", which deepened users' impression of it and deepened the "sleep economy". These include the entry of related products before, during and after sleep, such as mattresses, bedding, lights, odor equipment, sleep tracking, and sleep aid sounds. Determined to solve the user's sleep problem.
As the main product, the mattress was the biggest innovation in March 2020. All mattress series were transformed, replacing the previous mattress products with 8 mattresses, which increased all product comfort, airflow, Supporting force.
Today, Casper, its super product strategy has not only focused on the sleep of adults, but also the sleep of children and pets, and has entered the field of medical equipment to improve sleep.
When the product is good enough, Casper uses content marketing to position the brand as a "sleep expert."
In the whole process of consumers from cognition to complete purchase, each link has personalized content and consumer communication, and constantly strengthens the overall impression of the brand in the minds of consumers, which is conducive to distinguishing one's own brand from other brands.
As a mattress giant started on the Internet, Casper uses blogs to compare products, which will help more consumers understand product information, and guide consumers on how to choose a suitable mattress size to increase the click-through rate of the website.
Casper uses the power of the Internet to allow every consumer who uses the product to get a $75 Amazon gift card after recommending it to his family and friends, and the recommender can enjoy a 10% discount when buying the product again, further stimulating consumption The author gave the product Amway to friends around him.
05
to sum up
Casper's super product strategy
1) Directly hit the pain points of consumers buying mattresses.
2) Explore user needs, focus on a product, innovate the product, grasp the supply chain, and let the product bring value to the user.
3) Appropriate marketing, systematically connecting with consumers, combining online and offline, increasing users' stickiness and trust in products.
4) Find the development direction of the enterprise, and make full use of the advantages of the enterprise to transform with the fierce competition.
For low-frequency products, it may limit the development of enterprises. Many brands can only continue to attract consumers and create new revenues only if they continue to maintain their innovative capabilities.
In the process of creating super products, only companies that understand user needs and focus on users and can use products to solve user pain points can create super products and find their own super product strategy.