New bed or sleeping pill? Doctors need education
David Perry, Executive Editor -- Furniture Today, September 9, 2007
While the sleep products industry struggled last year, the sleeping pill industry had a boom year. Sadly, those two trends are related, I think.
Our industry saw its unit volume decline by 1.4% in 2006, according to the annual report recently issued by the International Sleep Products Assn. Price increases and a push to sell better bedding helped us boost the dollar value of bedding shipments by 4.7% to $6.8 billion.
Meanwhile, the sleeping pill industry recorded some staggering increases. Prescriptions were up last year by 15% to 47.8 million, and total sales of sleeping pills jumped 29% to $3.6 billion, BusinessWeek recently reported.
Do those figures bother you? They should. We are being outmarketed, outgrown and outsmarted by the drugmakers. They are taking consumer dollars that should be spent on better mattresses and funneling them to pills that, in many cases, only mask many consumers' real problem: a lousy, worn-out bed.
I guess we can't match the marketing dollars spent by the makers of sleeping pills — although our industry is far bigger than theirs, for now at least. But we must begin educating the doctors who wrote those 47.8 million prescriptions for sleeping pills that there is much more to a good night's sleep than a little pill.
What we need, I think, is a campaign designed to educate the medical community that a new bed makes a great deal of difference in how consumers sleep. Exhibit A should be the Oklahoma State University study that demonstrates, conclusively, that new beds help consumers get a better night's sleep. We need to prepare a concise overview of that study and distribute it widely throughout the medical community. We must encourage doctors to recognize that the right mattress is an important component in the better sleep equation.
Now, too many doctors are divorcing the mattress from the sleep equation.
We also need to include more messages about better sleep in our retail advertising, a point that Mark Quinn of Leggett & Platt made at our bedding conference a while back. And we also need to step up the Better Sleep Council's commendable efforts.
It may seem daunting to try to compete with the sleeping pill juggernaut, but we've got no choice. As more and more consumers turn to sleeping pills, they turn away from new mattresses. They are trapped in a vicious cycle of relying on pills to help them sleep on worn-out beds. We must break that cycle before the mattress becomes an endangered species.
You may think I am exaggerating the threat. But last year sleeping pill sales grew six times faster than mattress sales. The clock is ticking. Let's wake up to this major threat to the health of our industry.
Contact David Perry at dperry@reedbusiness.com
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