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When Commerce Met Art

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As my readers know, I am a huge fan of marketing history (to the point of being supremely nerdy). Over the past few years, I went back through the centuries to find great stories for my book, Why Marketing Works. That research missed a very cool tale that I am happy now to share. It involves Walter Paepcke and his company, Container Corporation of America (CCA).

When just 25, Paepcke inherited his father’s Chicago-based wooden crate empire. Predicting the shift to a consumer goods economy requiring smaller, lighter packaging, he moved production from wooden crates to corrugated paperboard containers. He bought a bunch of other packaging suppliers along with paper mills to ensure vertical integration and founded CCA in 1926. One smart fellow…as you will learn (read to the end to see how he and his wife are responsible for the popularity of the town of Aspen).

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Losing Sleep: The Mattress Industry is Burning

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There is an adage in the advertising business. Don’t sell the mattress, sell the sleep. The lesson being, showcase the benefit, not the features. It is a smart guidance for anyone selling anything. If you are an internet provider, you do not feature “speed” alone, you show the customer what they can do with that speed and the time saved.

Selling the sleep is something the exploding mattress industry has failed to take to heart. What prompted me to write this was a whopping 8-page ad in the latest issue of Entrepreneur magazine. This spread is from the Tomorrow mattress company. It is a curious piece of traditional advertising for an on-line disruptor. The print ad looks like a software seller’s website.

It starts by extolling a host of company virtues: expertise, innovation, commitment…and American made. When it comes to the product, the “hybrid mattress combines the pressure-relieving comfort of memory foam and the unbeatable support of individually wrapped coils for deep, uninterrupted sleep.” Tomorrow is selling a messy mix of features and benefits in lofty language (their strategy and copywriting need help).

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