Every company wants to turn customers into advocates but few have managed it quite as successfully as ultra-premium Swedish bed manufacturer Hästens.
And, when you’re in the business of selling beds starting from €5,580 ($AU9,100), personal recommendations are worth their weight in gold — possibly more, in fact.
“The highest ROI [channel] is happy customers,” Hästens’ chief customer and marketing officer James Haschberger, told B&T at Salesforce’s Connections conference in Chicago.
“We have clusters of stores, four in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and New York, so when you have a happy customer, they tell their friends ‘I made an amazing investment in myself’ as opposed to showing up and saying ‘Oh my friend raves about this bed so I had to come here and find out.’
James Aschberger, Hästens’ chief customer and marketing officer.
“The most effective channel is a happy customer that brings someone else. We call them ‘Positive activists.’ That is something you can only passively influence through a great product and service.”
Those positive activists are not the shy and retiring types, either. Aschberger explained that they run the gamut from high-profile business people to elite athletes and even musicians. This high-value list of clients have chosen to make an “investment” in themselves with a good night’s sleep.
“Oh, Vividus bed where I’m laying my head,” he sang on his 2022 song Wasting Angels with Aussie artist The Kid LAROI.
The Hästens Vividus bed starts at $US150,000 (around $AU225,000), for what it’s worth.
“I failed so far in different roles with marketing mix modelling. So I’d rather look at the confidence levels and the rate of change. That really changes by market and your response to it.”
Hästens is a 172-year-old business and is still owned by the same family that founded it. It stresses the importance of its traditional craftsmanship and approach to personal, high-touch customer service in its marketing. At an event with so much focus on the ability to personalise at an enterprise scale using AI, one wonders quite why the storied business is here at a martech conference.
“We use technology as an enabler to have those in-person experiences. With our Hästens Retail System [which runs on Salesforce’s tech], I can have a conversation with you about a bed and in less than 120 seconds, you have a payment link for a $US300,000 ($AU450,000) bed, fully configured and then when it’s paid it goes straight into our ERP audit system and everything is validated.
“It is in one way enabling our people and that human element because we need customers to come in and interact with our people to find the right bed. The feel and everything. So could you at one point have AI do it? Yes, but for many people that is not the reason they come. We need to make our people smarter, better equipped, trained and confident in the way they interact with customers.”
Hästens’ approach to its product is interesting, too. Rather than seeing itself as a bed company, it sees itself operating in the wellness space. By buying a Hästens’ bed, its high-value clients are investing not just in a comfy mattress and well-designed frame, they’re investing in their productivity and potential. Its CEO Jan Ryde, explained Aschberger, is focused on making the world a better place, “more loving, more peaceful, more joyful.”
“A significant portion of our customers are in positions of influence where the mood they’re in, the energy level they have and how they behave has an impact on many others,” he explained.
“They’re executives, business owners, so if they make shitty decisions, that might have bigger consequences than if they were well-rested.”
A significant portion of Hästens’ marketing activities does not revolve around directly marketing to customers. Instead, it spends a significant amount of time and tech expertise in marketing to interior designers. These are the people placing beds in their customers’ homes — and that’s homes plural, by the way.
“You can engage interior designers using Marketing Cloud. Reach out to them, give them opportunities and even make high-resolution renderings available to them,” said Aschberger.
“When they render a place as a 3D model, the bed doesn’t have five polygons, it shows exactly where we’re going to put it and what it will look like.
“We use Salesforce in our B2B and B2C management. We have hospitality, real estate developers and independent resellers as partners. We need to manage them and interact with them. We use Salesforce for our internal newsletter, too, so our partners have real-time information.
“Yes, it’s craftsmanship in how we built the product but underneath, to be successful and able to grow, we need technology.”
Lead image credit: Hastens/Instagram.