Industry failing to close bedding's big buying gap
David Perry, Executive editor -- Furniture Today, March 31, 2003
There are at least two sides to almost any issue, so this week we'll take a less-positive look at some important bedding consumer research done by Furniture/Today.
I presented an upbeat view of that research in a column that advised furniture retailers to promote bedding more often. In that March 3 column, I noted that "bedding continues to be the category more American households buy than any other."
Our broad consumer study found that in 2002, 15.1% of U.S. households shopped for bedding, and 10.8% of U.S. households purchased bedding. No other mainstream home furnishings category even came close to those numbers. So that's a big plus for bedding.
But here's a minus: The percentage of consumers who shopped for bedding last year but did not buy in that year remains high: 28.5%. We call that the "buying gap." This gap is much lower in bedding than in most other product categories — more good news — but the bedding buying gap is actually higher now than it was when we did the first of our big consumer studies in 1998.
That first study found a bedding buying gap of 27.9% in 1997. Bedding's buying gap went up to 28.9% in 2000, our second consumer study found, before dropping slightly to its current level.
Don Hofmann, senior vice president of marketing at Simmons, commented on the buying gap in a March 24 letter to the editor. "Buying a mattress is a planned purchase, not an impulse purchase," Hofmann wrote. "Consumers don't go shopping for a mattress unless there is an interest in buying one. What the numbers in Furniture/Today tell us is that nearly one-third of the consumers who entered the mattress buying process left without buying anything.... The message is clear: We aren't delivering what consumers are looking for."
He's got a point.
There are a number of reasons why consumers shop for beds but don't buy. They may have had a bad experience in the store. They may have gotten a bad case of sticker shock. That's what happens when we pound away at low-ball twin bedding prices like $99 or $69 in our newspaper ads, then try to sell consumers a $999 sleep set.
Or consumers may have gotten frustrated by the difficulty of doing comparison shopping. Let's face it: We really don't want consumers to compare bedding models. That's why we give similar beds different names and different covers.
The really sad part of this story is that we as an industry are failing to deliver a better night's sleep — and thus a better life — to almost one-third of those who shop for bedding. Our big buying gap says we've got a very big job ahead of us. And a wonderful opportunity too. If we could close just 1% of the gap, we would generate an additional $25 million in bedding sales in almost 50,000 more sales transactions.
