Microtargeting is a remarkable thing. Even casual podcast listeners, particularly those between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, can recite with minimal prompting the key design features of a Casper mattress. And it’s not just Casper—there are plenty of competitors with nearly as aggressive advertising campaigns: Leesa, BedInaBox, Lull, Nest, CloudSleep, Yogabed, Avocado, GhostBed, and more. Only one of these is made up.
Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener—a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter—is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.
How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.
And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a Casper Essential. (...)
The number of online, low-overhead boxed mattress hawkers certainly will undergo a period of sifting and winnowing in the near future, a battle for survival in which only the strong and nimble will survive. Casper was among the first to the battlefield, establishing both a dominant position and a slew of imitators ready to found a company with no employees, take your money, and have a mattress from some factory they have never seen drop-ship you the promise of deep sleep and the banishment of back pain to the land of wind and ghosts.
Young college-educated consumers are supposed to be aiming higher. In the 1980s or 1990s, for example, advertisers would have been throwing higher end, more Exclusive products at urban, cool younger people. These are society’s tastemakers, after all.
But a funny thing happened in the intervening years. Older generations began to salt the earth behind them, doing everything Wall Street and the MBA class could dream up to make labor less secure, jobs longer and harder, and wages lower. As long as only blue-collar employment was on the chopping block, the petit bourgeois was more than happy to play along. Think of the tax cuts! The raging Dow!
Then the reaper came for the rest of us. Slowly it became apparent that manual labor isn’t the only kind that can be outsourced; that unions can be broken in any segment of the economy; that vicious anti-government and -tax politics would coopt nativism to get the working class really enthusiastic about voting for its own destruction; that higher education would vomit enormous numbers of credentialed, debt-saddled people into the economy to drive down wages in what were once middle class professions.
Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.
by Ed Burmila, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Casper
Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener—a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter—is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.
And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a Casper Essential. (...)
The number of online, low-overhead boxed mattress hawkers certainly will undergo a period of sifting and winnowing in the near future, a battle for survival in which only the strong and nimble will survive. Casper was among the first to the battlefield, establishing both a dominant position and a slew of imitators ready to found a company with no employees, take your money, and have a mattress from some factory they have never seen drop-ship you the promise of deep sleep and the banishment of back pain to the land of wind and ghosts.
Young college-educated consumers are supposed to be aiming higher. In the 1980s or 1990s, for example, advertisers would have been throwing higher end, more Exclusive products at urban, cool younger people. These are society’s tastemakers, after all.
But a funny thing happened in the intervening years. Older generations began to salt the earth behind them, doing everything Wall Street and the MBA class could dream up to make labor less secure, jobs longer and harder, and wages lower. As long as only blue-collar employment was on the chopping block, the petit bourgeois was more than happy to play along. Think of the tax cuts! The raging Dow!
Then the reaper came for the rest of us. Slowly it became apparent that manual labor isn’t the only kind that can be outsourced; that unions can be broken in any segment of the economy; that vicious anti-government and -tax politics would coopt nativism to get the working class really enthusiastic about voting for its own destruction; that higher education would vomit enormous numbers of credentialed, debt-saddled people into the economy to drive down wages in what were once middle class professions.
Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.
by Ed Burmila, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Casper
