In addition to product innovations, retailers and manufacturers are finding ways to enhance customers' bed-buying experiences, which many people have long dreaded with an intensity equal to that of buying a car.
The Heavenly Bed, for example, is one example of a partnership between the Simmons Corp., which began selling 95-cent mattresses made with coils in 1876, and Westin Hotels, owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts.
In four years, Westin hotels in the United States and Canada have sold former guests 4,000 of the "Heavenly Bed" setups, which cost about $3,000 for an entire ensemble; and 30,000 of its feather pillows ($65 to $75 each). During a recent sales promotion, "the phones were ringing off the hooks," said Bill Yetman, director of sales and marketing for the two Westins in Washington.
Sheraton Hotels, also part of Starwood, sells its Sweet Sleeper beds and bedding to former guests through a toll-free telephone number. And Tempur-Pedic has its own partnerships. Its Web site sends potential customers to a selection of hotels around the country -- the Hyatt Regency in Washington, plus two Holiday Inn properties in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg -- where they can buy themselves a night of sleep on the foam mattress.
This relatively new kind of symbiosis allows hotel guests to "test drive" products from beds to lighting to showerheads to hand lotions -- and then buy the products for their homes. It also allows companies to pitch their products in a relaxed and sometimes luxurious atmosphere.
About four years ago, Moen Inc. asked the Marriott Courtyard across the street from its North Olmsted, Ohio, headquarters to let the faucet company test out its Revolution Massaging Showerhead in some of the guest rooms. Consumer reaction was so positive, the company said, that the hotel asked Moen to let it sell the showerhead right at the front desk before it was released to the market at large. The Revolution was introduced through Home Depot stores in late 2001.
But sleep is what boomers are really jazzed about. And Stanford's Pelayo thinks marketing it through hotels is brilliant.
"It turns out," he said. "that one of the features of having chronic insomnia is that you sleep better away from your own home. When you have insomnia, it is in the back of your mind that tomorrow depends on how well you sleep tonight," he said. Away from your own bedroom, which rapidly becomes a torture chamber, you don't have the same pressure to sleep.
Pelayo said countless people who sleep well in hotels say: " 'That's it. I must need a better mattress.' They buy one and when the family asks how it is, they rave about it. Well, what are you going to say after you've spent $4,000 on a mattress?"
Pelayo said the Stanford clinic does not endorse any brand of mattress because there is no evidence that any one works better than another. He said that so-called "sleep-number" beds, in which a person can adjust the firmness of a mattress, appeal mightily to insomniacs because "they tend to be compulsive and perfectionist. Having something to control makes them feel better. But this never seems to work in a sustained fashion."
