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Bedshed is a West Australian success story.
Starting out as a small Perth bedding store selling waterbeds in 1980, it has expanded through franchise development to become one of Australia’s largest specialist mattress and bedroom furniture retailers.
At a time when the advertising industry is shrinking due to large spending clients sending their marketing budgets East for the lure of ‘smarter’ and supposedly ‘better thinking’, Bedshed has remained resolute in its support of the local industry.
Committed to long-term planning and very close working relationships, it is reaping the rewards and bucking trends.
Large format bedroom retailing is split among those selling mattresses and bedroom furniture at a low-price base, and specialist brand aggregators like Bedshed. Heavy discounting drives the sector – consumers purchase irregularly and when in market they are naturally attracted by a sale.
Bedshed wanted to break the passive purchase cycle and drive sales by creating an innovative and compelling point of difference based on a core competence that would position them above the race for the lowest price.
Bedshed knew that its greatest asset was its people – they were seen by its customers as having more expertise than the competition.
This helped define clear space for Bedshed to own and led the strategic drive to position Bedshed as ‘experts’ who really listen to their customers and provide the best advice. This would prove once and for all that, as their tagline states:
‘No one’s better in the bedroom’.
Brand and retail communications were expertly woven across multiple channels online, offline and in-store, to create a fully integrated brand-retail campaign.
The process began with Bedshed commissioning an unprecedented national study into bedroom behaviour. It was the largest body of independent research into bedroom behaviour ever undertaken in Australia and would form the evidence for the campaign.
It asked people right across the country what they get up to in the privacy of their bedrooms. The findings were insightful, interesting and sometimes downright hilarious results, and gave us everything we needed to create an innovative marketing campaign that was relatable, sharable, engaging and versatile enough to work across every imaginable media.
Research and data in its pure form isn’t particularly engaging. The Bedroom Report campaign was able to bring the data to life in fun and interesting ways.
Under the new campaign thinking, a fresh colour palette, fonts and graphics were produced to modernise the Bedshed approach. Graphic icons were designed to represent business services, and playful illustrations were created to enhance the personality of the brand and help bring The Bedroom Report to life, enabling seamless use through stores and across all marketing collateral.
TV commercials cleverly matched relevant Bedroom Report statistics with suitable promotional offers, all in an engaging and creative manner. An extensive array of Bedroom Report initiatives were designed to constantly interest, surprise and delight customers at all touch points, embedding the creative and statistics with either brand communication or promotional offers.
A bespoke Bedroom Report website was produced, sitting within the Bedshed corporate site. This non-sales portal presents Bedroom Report statistics, explaining and outlining what Australians get up to in their bedrooms and works seamlessly with extensive social activity to spread the Bedshed brand and expert positioning through a huge range of shareable content.
Targeted social media has proven a very valuable tool for engaging with customers online. It was a highly cost effective means to drive traffic to the website and simultaneously engage with a wider audience than traditional means.
The real-to-life creative is highly effective on social media, achieving high engagement and extending organic reach to further engage with audiences. The best performing social media posts of The Bedroom Report include real-to-life statistics such as “1 in 5 Australians sleep with their pet” and “Wear a bra to bed? 14% of women under 35 do”.
Radio particularly loved the campaign with program integration allowing stations to have a lot of fun with the Bedroom Report statistics, further extending the engagement and reach of the campaign. Competing stations vied for use and pushed the integration boundaries, bringing a new level of awareness, interest and personality to the Bedshed brand.
“This campaign has been a lot of fun and has driven excellent sales. The Bedroom Report not only confirms Bedshed as bedroom experts, it presents us as an innovative, ground breaking and fun franchise business that people want to be involved in.”
In-store posters, flyers and stickers utilised research statistics and brought The Bedroom Report to life, further promoting Bedshed’s approach of meeting customer needs by understanding what matters in the bedroom.
Bedshed’s light-hearted, relevant and insightful research enhances customer experience by recognising the complexities and challenges of life, and helping find the right solution for each customer.
As a result, the customer now feels like they’re listened to. They trust Bedshed to offer expert advice and when Bedshed says that
“no-one’s better in the bedroom”,
they agree!
“The Bedroom Report has become the number one talking point in-store, refocussing the conversation with customers away from price and product and more towards understanding sleep. It’s changed our relationships with customers and has had an amazingly positive effect on our company culture and our sales results”
The addition of two new business pillars – the 60-Night Comfort Guarantee and 7-Day Price Promise – have greatly enhanced the customer experience.
They can shop with confidence knowing that if they’re not entirely happy with their mattress purchase they can exchange it for another, no questions asked. And if Bedshed advertise the item they purchased at a lower price within 7 days, they will refund the difference.
Two more reasons why no-one’s better in the bedroom.
The objective of The Bedroom Report was to increase Bedshed’s brand awareness and drive consumer perception around their unique positioning as ‘the bedroom experts’. The Bedroom Report represented Bedshed’s largest ever budget to be spent on a brand campaign with over 32% of total media spend switched from tactical retail and invested into brand building.
The Bedroom Report is delivering genuine sustained growth and enabling Bedshed to buck national economic trends and a recognised industry wide decline in sales. In recent years Bedshed has experienced unprecedented growth and now has a network of 37 stores across Australia, with more in the pipeline, and a turnover of around $100 million.
In a tough retail market where listed retailers have downgraded revenue and profit numbers and their expansion plans have stalled, the results for Bedshed speak for themselves:
– 5 new franchise stores in FY18/19
– Improved metrics in brand awareness and perception
– Strong sales and margin growth across the network
– Sales increase of more than 9%
– Average transaction value growth of nearly 20%
“It’s unusual to see such a direct correlation between research and business results. The improvement in our brand metrics particularly in our WA home state directly relates to a 10%+ sales increase year on year within a very difficult economic environment. Similarly, the East Coast, where we are growing our brand presence and attributes has mirrored business growth on multiple metrics.”
Australia’s retail industry giants gathered at Crown Melbourne for the inaugural Large Format (Big Box) Retail Association Awards, where Bedshed was awarded the coveted Marketing Campaign of the Year 2019 for its national Bedroom Report campaign.
Members of the Large Format Retail Association include some of the most well respected retail brands in Australia, including major brands such as Bunnings Warehouse, Officeworks, JB HiFi and IKEA.
The Bedroom Report campaign impressed the judges across all the criteria for the award, including innovation of marketing campaign, return on investment, customer engagement and customer experience.
“The Bedroom Report allowed us to align what we’re doing in store, what we’re doing with our franchise partners and what we’re communicating to our customers all into one message…and certainly that got us a really strong result.”