Remember when you were in elementary school and the policeman came in for assembly and spoke to you about safety, which was always followed by the fireman wearing the Smokey the Bear t-shirt, who was followed by the local doctor talking about how important sleep is? How about your life science teachers in middle school and high school constantly talking about how important sleep was to peak performance. If that wasn’t enough my college professors were always in our face about lifestyle, and how we needed to make sleep a priority as we were getting ourselves ready to be competitive in the real world. I won’t even get into how sick and tired I am of going to the doctor where they are constantly on me about eating right, exercising more, and sleeping better. Are you relating to any of this? Well me neither because NONE OF IT EVER HAPPENED!
Education should be a big part of what we do because sleep is not valued the same way nutrition and exercise are when it comes to making that connection to quality of life. Yes people value sleep there is no doubt, but the average person doesn’t know a lot about sleep health and they certainly are not teaching anything to their kids. Why do we insist on drinking bottled water these days? When the Quinn’s are at a sporting event at school and my kids want money for a bottle of water and I tell them to get a drink from the fountain, they look at me like I am asking them to drink from the river. Nothing researched here but my recollection of that industry was that Amway invented a home water filtration system, so to drive demand, they had their multi level marketing team share the story about how bad tap water was. (There are likely many other contributors here but this works to make the following point.) They educated the public that our water wasn’t clean enough. Today that industry sells over $12 billion dollars of bottled water which equates to over 10 billion gallons of water each year.
What are you doing to educate people on the importance of sleep to quality of life? From those lesson comes the ability to market the solutions to bad sleep which are pillows, sheets, lighting solutions, and oh yes, MATTRESSES. If the perceived need isn’t there to the degree that you want it to be, sometimes you need to manufacture it. How many bedding companies/retailers send their sales force out to our local schools to lead these kind of talks? What is being done in the education system to advance the idea that sleep is important? What if we all started with the kids and did something to educate them on what a big deal sleep health is? I bet they grow up to value their sleep equipment in a different way. What do you think? Share your thoughts with me in the comments section or on LinkedIn.
BIG SHOUT OUT to Mr. Mark Kinsley, the other half of Dos Marcos and head Sleep Geek. He was nice enough to interview me for their podcast on my new venture bringing Spink and Edgar mattresses to the United States. We had a great time doing it so if you are interested in the how and why of what we are up to, give it a listen. It’s called Sheering Sheep For Fun and Profit.