Consumer Reports Mattress Ratings – The Good News and Bad News
If you are looking for mattress ratings from a credible source, such as Consumer Reports, there’s good news and bad news.
The Bad News
Consumer Reports does not rate mattresses. There are a couple of reasons for this, they say. First, their testers disagree on which mattresses are most comfortable. As a result, Consumer Reports says that mattress choice is largely a matter of personal preference.
Second, Consumer Reports says that model names from the top mattress brands differ from store to store. As a result, they say it is impossible to compare models. In addition, they say that even for mattresses that are similar, there are differences in important characteristics that can affect comfort, such as quilting, padding, springs, etc.
Consumer Reports, however, does offer some sound general advice on mattress shopping, such as the importance of lying on different beds to see which one you personally prefer. But in regard to which mattress is best, they will not be of much, if any, help.
The Good News
Is it futile, then, to search for which mattresses may be best? Probably not — if you know where to look. A terrific source of mattress information can be found on hundreds, if not thousands, of online message boards that are scattered across the web.
People often use these message boards to ask others which mattresses they think are best. People then reply, often giving advice based on their own mattress ownership experience. The responses tend to be very informative, credible and free of “guerilla marketers” — people within the mattress industry who provide bogus online mattress reviews to sway consumer opinion one way or the other.
By the way, you don’t necessarily have to post a mattress question yourself on a message board. You can simply search the web for existing message board threads about mattresses or a particular mattress type or brand you are interested in.
And while you may not find out which mattresses are best on a model level, you will get a good sense of which is best on a brand level, and that can be very valuable information.
Online Consumer Behavior
Is online consumer behavior fundamentally different from offline consumer behavior? Consumer behavior online and offline has both similarities and differences. The e-commerce world is not as revolutionary as some would have us believe. For instances, the stages of the consumer decision process are basically the same whether the consumer is online or offline. On the other hand, the general model of consumer behavior requires modification to take into account new factors.
Web site features include the content, design and functionality of the site. There are parallels in the analog world. For instance, it is well known that consumer behavior can be influenced by store design and understanding the precise movements of consumers through a physical store and can enhance sales if goods and promotions are arranged along the most likely consumer tracks.
For instance, because consumers almost invariably enter a store and move to the right, high margin items tend to be located there. And because it is known that consumers purchase fresh dairy products frequently, they are put at the back of grocery stores. Proper store design and precision tracking of consumers is not new – but its technical implementation on the web, its lowered cost, its ubiquity and its comprehensiveness on the web are new.
With respect to click stream behavior, a number of researchers have argued that understanding the background demographics of Internet users is no longer necessary, and not that predictive in any event. In most studies of the consumer behavior, background demographics account usually for less than 10% of the observed behavior. Many believe instead that most important predictors of online consumer behavior are the session characteristics and the click stream behavior of the people online. The theory is that this information will enable marketers to understand what the consumer was looking for at each moment and how much were they willing to pay, allowing the marketers to precisely target their communications.
Click stream marketing takes maximum advantage of the Internet environment. It presupposes no prior knowledge of the customer and can be developed dynamically as customers use the Internet. It gives us the most comprehensive data that can be well transformed into useful information thereby providing us with the maximum benefit and enabling us to get much better results in terms of ROI.