Challenge
Eve’s target audience of young, busy, successful urbanites, care about how they feel, how they look, and how they perform at work. But who wants to talk about mattresses? We needed something more, something to drive water cooler chat – for us, that meant finding an enemy.
Solution
And what better enemy out there than the snooze button. Here’s an alarming fact for serial snoozers: hitting the snooze button has a genuine impact on your health. Those snatched minutes of sleep in between alarms? Not restful. You can’t achieve a proper REM cycle so instead you fall into ‘sleep inertia’, a condition where you feel groggy and lethargic for up to four hours after getting up. Being dragged sharply from sleep results in a spike of the stress hormone cortisol which can even put pressure on your cardiovascular system. Who knew? We started by developing a persuasive brand proposition, Refuse To Snooze. To launch our campaign in opposition to the snooze button, we first needed to prove its harmful effects. We worked with a neuroscientist and mental health expert, and the co-director of the Sleep Lab at Goldsmiths Psychology Department to publish some original research into the harmful effects of snoozing. We even found that an incredible 81% of Brits hit snooze every day. Armed with bags of science and data, we wrote an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, entreating him to remove the snooze button in the next iPhone update. Seriously. We published it in City AM on 13th May, World Sleep Day. The open letter alone, unveiled on World Sleep Day, generated an insane volume of, and was discussed everywhere from Good Housekeeping to Jimmy Fallon’s opening monologue ? ? ?. The campaign was deployed across print ads and cover wraps. And then, finally, we launched a unique podcast also called “Refuse To Snooze”. Each episode was exactly 9 minutes in length, the same length of time as the iPhone snooze function. Because if we were asking people to ditch the snooze button, what are we giving them instead? Hosted by King of Morning TV, Andi Peters, each episode provided a burst of high-energy content covering topics such as motivation, fitness, and parenting. Guests included rugby captain, Chris Robshaw; philanthropist, Katie Piper; presenter, Anna Richardson; model, Jodie Kidd and Olympic boxer, Anthony Ogogo– all being interviewed from the lovely comfort of an Eve mattress.
Want fresh marketing stories in your inbox?
Get the weekly email that makes you a marketing genius.
Stay informed and inspired, for free.