A CALL CENTER IN THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, March 24—Anyone calling my extension at Direct recently would have heard a message stating that I was on vacation. This was a lie. The truth is that for the past week I have been situated at an inbound/outbound telesales room as part of the direct marketing industry’s embedded journalist program.
Since last Monday, I have lived at the call center of Mattress Dude, a mattress and box spring marketer in Los Angeles. Mattress Dude specializes in every form of nocturnal accoutrement with the exception of someone a customer might actually share its beds with.
If the folks at Mattress Dude had any consternation about hosting a marketing reporter in their midst, they have hidden it well, although this may be a natural outgrowth of their Left Coast laid-back mentality. Or it may be that, despite their mien, this week has been one of the most frenetic in the 6-year-old company’s history and they’ve been too busy to complain.
“For weeks, pundits have been telling us that this war would be fought in America’s living room,” said Roland Greef, Mattress Dude’s call center manager. “We figured that represented a golden opportunity for us. If you look at television-to-bedroom penetration rates, the likelihood that citizens were going to be following the war’s progress from under their down comforters was pretty high.”
In response to President Bush’s setting a final deadline with Iraq, and the resulting increased CNN coverage, Greef immediately mobilized his call center, expanding its usual 6 a.m.-10 p.m. schedule to 24-hour status. “We wanted to meet America’s need for duvet covers and buckwheat pillows during this crisis,” he said.
At the Mattress Dude call center, every station is equipped with a bed, instead of a traditional desk and chair. This allows all of Mattress Dude’s sleep consultants (the company’s term, not mine) to speak about its products from firsthand knowledge, although sleeping on the job is not condoned.
For my own accommodations, I chose the Big Muddy model, which is a platform base with raised slat sides that contains a thin Temperfoam covered with several gallons of liquid green clay, which is supposedly wonderful for the skin. I’m sitting waist deep in it as I file this, and my epidermis has never looked better.
Greef anticipates that Big Muddy will become a fairly standard part of Mattress Dude’s inventory during the next few months as Americans seek to turn their attention from the war and its aftermath and toward self-indulgent distractions. Big Muddy was originally a custom design, but the offering proved quite popular among the firm’s employees.
Have there been any unforeseen factors in the company’s latest marketing strategy?
“We didn’t take into account the time difference between America and Baghdad,” Greef said. “Most of the live fighting is going on during our daylight hours when people are at work, which means we have to count on Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour’s commentary to captivate consumers to stay in our products.”
To respond to the portrayals in this column, please contact [email protected]
Network
