What you need to know:

• Bedding retailer Snooze has kicked off a largescale, through-the-line marketing campaign to honour its 50^th birthday milestone this year.
• Doused in creative nostalgia and with a hint of future potential on the side, the campaign is as much about informing and reminding consumers of the group’s lineage and history to lift awareness and consideration as it is about giving employees and franchisees gee up on the strength of the brand.
• For Snooze’s marketing and CX leaders, playing the long and the short game is vital given the average lifecycle for a mattress of 7-10 years. The campaign as a result straddles both brand and retail activities.
• It’s also another opportunity to present Snooze’s value-adds, something GM of marketing and commerce, Doni Davies, says is a vital strategy to prevent more discounting and upping promotional cadences in the current soft economic climate – something the group has managed to avoid in 2024, she says.

Big sleep

Snooze GM of marketing and ecommerce, Doni Davies, is the first to admit the bedding retailer loves a sales promotion or two. But the marketer and her team insist they’ve refrained from upping their promotions cadence this year in the face of the dour economic climate and instead put the emphasis on adding practical value for customers.

Speaking to Mi3 following the release of its new 50^th integrated brand and retail marketing campaign program, Davies and her head of customer experience, Penny Watson, have been working hard to dial up brand trust, high-quality product, locally owned franchise expertise and value as they mark the milestone.

“A lot of people are starting this promotional craziness, and to discount, discount and discount now there’s economic turmoil and things are getting tighter,” Davies says. Judging from the recent run of full-year results posted to the ASX, retailers have overall held relatively firm on top-line sales figures – with the odd exception. But in the main, gross and net profits levels are down, something Davies agrees reflects the state of the economic climate right now.

But there are two problems to upping promotions, she says. “One is you devalue your product, which has a value. We don't want to do that. We get that not everybody has the choice to do that,” Davies says. “But it's also cyclical. Next year, because you've discounted that level, you're pushing those numbers again to try to make last year's numbers.

“We actually haven't changed any of our promotional campaigns or cadence based on that. Now, we are an industry that is on sale a lot. I don't want to hide that fact or say we're perfect in our promotional cadence. But we haven't actually made any changes this year with that side of things. Where we've decided to invest in is really adding value for customers.”

Value in this sense includes a gift with purchase, free delivery, or removing your mattress. In other words, things Snooze can practically do to demonstrate additional value. The retailer also runs a customer loyalty program and is working to add value within that construct. The arrival of its 50^th anniversary as a business was another golden opportunity to connect the dots between brand and retail value.

“We've been able to incorporate the 50th as a fun promotional campaign, but it’s actually adding value in the customer's eyes and hopefully leading them into our store instead of one of our competitor’s stores,” Davies says. “That's probably been the most important thing for us over the last six months, then going into the next six months.

“But don't forget, we have amazing franchisees who are extremely knowledgeable who we know add value every day. We have Snooze Profiler, a tool you can use to take the guesswork out of finding the right mattress, which can be quite tricky. We have amazing staff. As a recipe, we've really been lucky to have that and not have to dip further into discounting.”

Leveraging 50

For Davies and Watson, running an integrated, through the line 50^th anniversary campaign is as much about informing and reminding consumers of its lineage and history as it is about geeing up franchisees and employees.

“A grandparent or adult may now we’ve been around a while, but there’s a whole new generation coming into the market every day we're allowed this opportunity now to speak to and say, look, not that there's anything wrong with being born three years ago or five years ago, but we have 50 years of experience. We've tried it, we've tested it and we're sitting in a position where we can be called subject matter experts in this area,” Davies says. “We're leaning heavily on the 50th as an opportunity to get people excited, have a little fun, but still give them a reason to really be excited about this brand.”

Watson and Davies are coy on the extent of the marketing program and channels in the mix, though Watson says it’s leveraging 50 years from a corporate, brand and retail perspective as a “truly integrated campaign” between brand and retail.

“We're seeing favourable results, and I think we can say it is working. As to channels at the moment, I'm not sure we could call out a specific channel to say one is doing better than the other,” Watson says.

That said, Snooze to date has done a little bit with influencers, avoided TikTok and leant heavily towards TV.

“We would be lying if we said TV wasn’t one of our largest channels. It serves its purpose, function and has the eyeballs. But we end up utilising every channel in almost every capacity and have Match and Wood helping us manage through that to ensure we're optimising our mix properly,” Davies says.

Creatively, Snooze has brought back its iconic red cap for the duration of the campaign, sitting atop its logo. It’s taken a decidedly nostalgic approach to the campaign narrative, featuring iconic bedroom furniture over the years including the waterbed, futon, tubular bunk beds and even the TV bed of the 1980s.

“We had a number of things we wanted to convey. Firstly, that this is a milestone – half a century of being in Australia and being quite successful as an Australian brand. We wanted to talk about our success,” says Watson. “It also allowed us to reflect on our past from a nostalgic point of view, but also then to look into the future.

“One of our lines is ‘50 years young’. That isn’t just a nod to our history. It allows us to leverage our brand equity – we have very strong brand equity and we’re trusted. Given our brand recognition, we can have a little bit of fun because we're in a very positive position to do that. That's where we could embellish our logo and introduce the iconic red cap.”

Then there’s connecting with consumers. “What's really important is we've made it contextually relevant. You'll see in future campaigns how we're integrating in the 50th, not only from a brand perspective, but in our retail offer,” Watson continues. “What we’re really trying to do is add value to our retail campaigns by injecting some of this 50th celebration into the mix.”

With the recommended average lifecycle of a mattress sitting between seven to 10 years, and a wide target market – we all have to sleep, after all – making sure Snooze bolsters brand awareness and consideration is key.

“Adidas will have a new cool shoe that comes out and everybody at a certain age is in the market for that shoe exactly at that point. Because we don't have that, we know we're constantly speaking to people who are six months out, two years out, maybe even longer,” Davies says.

“We also wanted to enhance customer engagement and content integration into those campaigns. So no matter what campaign we are running, we were always trying to build this brand loyalty, advocacy with customers. It’s important to also make sure we're engaging with our franchisees. They're really the face-to-face of the brand – when we talk about what we do, it's nothing compared to what they do. At the end of the day, they close every sale. We're extremely aware and hypersensitive to that.

“The more excited they are, the more excited support centre is, the more excited we are as a business around the 50th and the activities we do, and the more it resonates in the customers’ experience as well.”

While Davies a big believer in brand building, however, the ultra-competitive nature of the space makes it a very tight balancing act between what Snooze does for brand and what to do for retailer.

“If you're in market, we want to make sure we're speaking to you right now, but we also want to make sure we're seeding that opportunity for the future,” she adds. “Match and Wood [Snooze’s lead agency partner] plays a very big role in supporting us with that in our decision-making about whether it be channels or spend.”

Tech play

Elsewhere, Davies points to significant strides in Snooze’s customer journey mapping. Snooze brought on Tealium as its CDP two years ago and has been able to improve its digital ads ROAS by suppressing customer audiences across all digital channels.

Through stronger database segmentation, Snooze has also been able to grow email delivery volume by over 30 per cent while maintaining efficiency metrics. In-store data is now combined in the marketing database, allowing the team to make more strategic decisions across media and email channels.

“We truly embrace this holistic view that ecommerce and bricks-and-mortar go together because we know so many customers start their journey online then ultimately end up in the store,” Davies comments.

“It’s not unnoticed by us customers still enjoy trying out a mattress – thank goodness – before purchasing it. So while we know the website can support the start of that journey for many customers, the majority actually end up in the store. The strength has always been our franchisees on that end, but we've been able to pave that journey into the store with as much information in the most curated way possible for the consumer.”

Another back-end improvement in the works is a POS system upgrade. “We've worked for a long time on getting this upgrade going and now we’re executing and teaching stores,” Davies says.

“The whole point is to make things easier for the franchise on the floor. The more time you spend with the customer consulting and talking to them, the better... That I think is going to make the staff in-store a lot more agile.

“We can start having a conversation about new things we want to do in the back end because we've upgraded that system. That is an unsung hero, right? It doesn't change how you bought the product, and it doesn't change how your experience was. But it will massively change how the stores work and our capabilities into the future.”

The next foray is AI and Snooze is now looking, talking and understanding how best to utilise AI.

“AI is there, we're looking at it, we're interested in it, we just need to figure out how it makes sense for us as a business. Once we do that, then we'll hopefully dive in – but we haven't gotten there yet,” Davies says.

“I'll say this to everybody I work with: I want the outcome. I want to know what it is we’re trying to achieve before we just do something. There’s a lot of stuff like chatbots people are just throwing in but for me, it’s about what are we solving for. Because if we don't know what we're solving for, we’re just adding on tools that don't bring value to the customer. At the end of the day, that's our goal: To make the customer feel more valuable and bring them added value.”