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BedTimes, Feature, March 2007

Consumers: What will they want next?

By Barbara Nelles

Predicting trends is, well, trendy. Or, as Reinier Evers, founder of Amsterdam-based Trendwatching.com, told The New York Times “trends are the new trend.”

Trends aren’t simply entertaining—something to chat about at cocktail parties or industry conferences. Seismic shifts are happening in consumption patterns, andsuccessful companies carefully monitor and nimbly react to them.

“But trend predicting is not about spotting ‘the next big thing,’ ” cautions Robyn Waters, a former vice president at Target who is credited with making the retail discounter hip.

Waters, now an author and founder of RW Trend in New York City, focuses on “macro trends,” or consumption patterns that will last a good five to 10 years in her book, The Hummer and the Mini. Predicting macro trends is about “connecting to what’s important in the hearts and minds of consumers,” she says.

Here BedTimes takes a look at current and emerging consumer trends, offering a “mash-up” of insights to help the bedding industry better predict what consumers may want next from their mattresses. (Trust us: “mash-up” is a trendy term. Look it up at www.webopedia.com.)

The macro view
“Vitality is huge,” says Michelle Barry, senior vice president at the Hartman Group, a Bellevue, Wash., consulting firm. “Products that deliver feelings of rejuvenation and sustained energy, that help people feel good throughout the day, are a primary aspiration” for consumers. 

Waters concurs: “Consumers are working long and hard, so when they relax they want to relax hard. She identifies a trend that ties into the quest for vitality—“extreme relaxation.” For instance, in The Hummer and the Mini she discusses laughter yoga, which came to the fore in the mid-1990s and spread rapidly worldwide. It’s basically what it sounds like: Groups get together to practice forced laughing that turns into endorphin-releasing real laughter. Then there is the astounding proliferation of spas and spa products. There are even spas for kids and babies. A $10,000 bed set would clearly tie into the quest for extreme relaxation.

Waters also identifies consumer desire for “luxurious commodities.” Consumers are trying to “de-average” their homes with purchases that “possess higher levels of quality, taste and aspiration.” For instance, during her tenure at Target, store customers snapped up sleek Michael Graves toilet brushes and elegant Phillipe Starck pedestal sippy cups for toddlers. Now consumers buy aromatherapy laundry detergent to use in their stylish Whirlpool Duet washing machines.

“Mass customization” is another big trend. Evers, whose trend predictions get monikers like “gravanity” (a meld of graffiti and vanity) says mass customization is “a reaction to the generic, a craving to personalize and build identity in a mass-produced world.” Think of Ford’s design-your-Scion program, custom-colored M&Ms, personalized Jones Soda labels, Serotta bicycles built for your body—or handcrafted beds made to the specifications of the consumer.

“Marketers who add customization empower consumers and build a sense of ownership. And ownership breeds brand loyalty,” Barry says.

“Customizing makes shopping for commodities more interesting, more creative,” says trend spotter Marian Salzman, executive vice president of ad agency JWT and co-author of Next Now. Salzman cites a number of customizable products—from custom-designed flatware to British designer Tristan Webber’s tailor-made jeans, created with a body mapping system similar to that used by some bedding producers.

Globalization, another macro trend, is affecting consumers, as well. They now expect to be able to source anything from anywhere. And forums like e-commerce, eBay, YouTube, blogs, product-rating sites and viral marketing campaigns spread brand awareness around the world.

“Every product or brand is, by definition, a global brand,” according to a Hartman Group newsletter.

Consider how young people eat today. “Younger consumers are as comfortable indulging in Japanese candy or sushi after school and cooking pad Thai for dinner as they are meeting their friends for dim sum on a Saturday afternoon,” the Hartman Group says.

Globalization also is creating “a personal sense of responsibility to understand and engage with the whole,” says trend expert Faith Popcorn in her 2007 predictions, The New Networked Self.

Consumers are more aware of “the consequences of consumption,” she says. Expect to see “enviro-biographies” attached to just about everything. An enviro-biography will comfort consumers by explaining “the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled and where it (will) end up after being thrown away or recycled,” Popcorn says.

Why leave home?
Technological innovations will continue to make a big impact on how consumers live, work and play in their homes, according to trend watchers. And when it comes to technology, things can change overnight. Think of Apple’s iPod or its new iPhone. Or the once-mighty movie delivery service Netflix, which is now on stock analysts’ sell lists because of the growing ease of downloading movies and watching streaming video.

The consensus at a recent Silicon Alley “meet-up” in Manhattan is that “this will be the year of the connected home,” reports CNET.com blogger Caroline McCarthy. The meet-up geeks foresee “a fluidity between broadband audio and video, television, speakers and other components of the home media center.” Soon, predicts PC World magazine, wireless advances will “allow you to access any type of media, anywhere in the house.”

The future of home entertainment is not television—content “will be podcast, streamed,downloaded, shared, mashed up and available on screens from 2 to 200 inches,” the editors say. And all the different black boxes in the kitchen, family room and bedroom will be “subsumed into one media center or set-top box that does it all.”

PC World editors insist that the personal computer will remain your “go-to gizmo” though the “innards may be completely foreign.” Expect super-fast processing speeds, enormous storage capacity—about 20 terabytes by 2025—and fantastic graphics.

With all this technology comes growing concerns about privacy and security threats. But just as likely, your stuff will be watching you, many experts predict. Expect implanted sensors in products to issue warnings, advice and reminders. Just as your car tells you to fasten your seatbelt, soon it may sense if you’ve had too much to drink and refuse to start. A mattress set could indicate when it’s time to flip it—or consider replacing it.

In online virtual worlds—check out www.there.com or http://secondlife.com gamers inhabit other worlds without leaving home. They create avatars (representations of themselves) who “hang out with friends and meet new ones—all in a lush 3-D environment that’s yours to explore and help build,” one site says. The most popular “immersive online 3-D environment” may be www.worldofwar.com, which debuted in 2004. More than 8 million subscribers pay $15 per month to play.

“We’ll continue to integrate our physical selves more and more tightly with the informational processes going on around us,” predicts Mark Wallace, gamer and the editor of the Second Life Herald. (Yes, the virtual world has its own newspapers). “Imagine. You’ll read a news story, click through to a 3-D re-creation of the place where the event occurred, and then walk around it in the company of other people who are reading the same story at the same time.”

Could homes one day have LCD walls for instant “redecorating” or imagery of travels to far-off lands? Will anyone ever need to leave home again? Read more speculations from “Touring the Home of the Future” by columnist and blogger Momus at www.wired.com

What’s next for mattresses?
What do consumer and technological trends portend for mattresses? We asked trend watchers to speculate.

Consumers are hungering for inner peace, better health and increased vitality. Futurist Melinda Davis, author of The New Culture of Desire, describes the pervasive hunger for inner peace this way: “We are physical beings living in an imaginational world…human evolution has not kept up with the way we live today.”

Our days are spent in front of screens, and it’s difficult to find the “off” button for our churning brains. Consumers long for “instant altered states.” That’s why “product excellence, appropriate pricing and simple emotional and image-driven payoff is not enough. Consumers want some healing benefit beyond the functional purpose of the product itself,” Davis says. 

Consumer longings for healing and peace fit neatly with the sleep products category.

“With peace of mind the new gold standard, it’s not just about selling a bed. It’s about the whole ritual. It’s about sleep. It’s about feeling better. It’s ‘you’re worth it’ and ‘you deserve it.’ It’s possible to tap into that profound need among consumers for peace of mind,” says Robyn Waters, a former Target marketing guru who is now an author and founder of RW Trend in New York City.

“Mattress retailers need to reframe the importance of sleep and understand it’s not about discounting mattresses,” she adds.

“People are looking for a transformative experience when they purchase a mattress because mattresses have many connotations—physical, mental and emotional,” says Michelle Barry, senior vice president of the Hartman Group, a Bellevue, Wash., consulting firm.

Marian Salzman, executive vice president of ad agency JWT and co-author of Next Now, is even more provocative. “Sleep is the new sex,” she says. Arthur J. Spielman of the Center for Sleep Disorders Medicine & Research in New York offers the same quip, adding “people want it, need it, can’t get enough of it.”

“Beds could possibly be the hottest category one could be in,” Salzman says. “In my view the mattress is the palette, the canvas on which you paint the entire bedroom.” In fact, some trend experts believe the bedroom rivals the importance of the kitchen in the home. 

How transformative can a bed possibly be? Consider a future bed with anti-depressant properties. Or beds that deliver “real aromatherapy that is truly pharmaceutical, with a scent to heal our battered states of mind?” Salzman asks.

“I could also see how people would be interested in a ‘local bed,’ ” she says. “The shrinking globe is inspiring greater loyalty to our own communities. Think of the ‘slow food’ movement, which encourages people to base their diets on fresh, locally grown ingredients. What about a mattress and bed locally manufactured? Handcrafted mattresses made by nearby artisans using locally grown and produced components?

Although precisely how a bed is made is completely uninteresting to me, I want to know its history, its authenticity, its legacy. I think that’s how the customer feels.”

She continues with her speculation: “I also think one day we’ll see beds that are climate controlled, a bed that somehow contributes to your weight-loss program by speeding up your metabolism while you sleep or that speeds your recuperation,” Salzman says. “But it has to work—no one is going to pay an extra dime for it otherwise. I see beds that are very much personalized—created expressly for you based on your body type.”

“That’s part of the appeal of (Select Comfort’s) Sleep Number bed—the idea that you can customize your side of the bed,” Waters says.

“Personalization and customization is really requiring that something be about you for you. I think there will be an end to unisex beds,” Salzman adds. “There will be beds for couples, beds for men, beds for women, beds for teen-age girls, beds for teen-age boys. Perhaps you’ll have different color palettes or different fabrications. It’s all about the consumer requiring that it be ‘all about me.’ ”

That ties into another Salzman prediction: Master bedrooms with separate sleeping chambers for undisturbed sleep.

“The bedroom is about total slumber, yet it’s totally plugged into ‘the connected home,’ with a refrigerator, flat-screen TV, BlackBerry and laptop with Wi-Fi access. You need good ‘off’ switches. Unwiring and unplugging will become the most fashionable thing in 2007,” she says. Could separate sleeping chambers be one answer? (BedTimes, in fact, will look at that concept in its April issue.)

As mattress manufacturers consider crafting products of the future, trend watchers offer them this comforting truth: Consumers always will need new beds—and the frenetic pace of life will make them more eager to climb onto a good mattress and pull the covers over their heads.

Feel-better trends
* Canine companionship. Some 63% of U.S. households own a pet, up from 56% in 1998, and 45% own more than one pet. The pet of choice is dogs. “Dogs are playing a powerful new role in many of our lives,” writes author and dog trainer Jon Katz in Katz on Dogs. People are turning “to nature and the animal world to recapture some sense of unity with a world that otherwise seems chaotic and meaningless.” (Some savvy bed makers already are tapping this trend with swanky dog beds.)

* Nostalgia. “Everything old is new,” writes trend master Robyn Waters in The Hummer and the Mini. “We often want to go back to a simpler, saner time, when we weren’t tethered to (technology).” Montblanc pens are selling strong, so is the new Volkswagen Beetle.

* Simplicity. Consumers are increasingly interested in “sleek, simple” design, reports the Hartman Group of Bellevue, Wash. “The less decorated or decked out an object is, the more real or authentic it seems.” Simplicity is “an antidote to the perceived complexity and stress of modern life.”

* DIY health care. A trend toward self-treatment has been building for years, reports the Hartman Group. With ready access to information, consumers are practicing do-it-yourself health care, diagnosing themselves and devising their own remedies. If that doesn’t work, they go to the doctor armed with binders of information.

* ‘Yoda’ quest. People are “busy, stressed and crazy, and in times like these there is a tendency to look for outside guidance,” Waters says. “People want a Yoda, like Yoda from ‘Star Wars’. ” Coiner of the Yoda phrase, Melinda Davis writes in The New Culture of Desire that people are in a state of “mind emergency and are looking for a chooser, a trusted, godlike advocate to clear a path through the chaos for us.” Think Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, Deepak Chopra. Think life coaches, career coaches, personal trainers, therapists.

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