We just returned from delivering our daughter to a college in South Carolina and celebrating our son’s 16th birthday at TPC Sawgrass in Jacksonville. Tasked with booking hotels for the eight nights we were away I prescribed a nice balance of mid-priced hotels with a few affordable luxury nights to prevent the travel blahs. I was especially anticipating our return to a well-known hotel flag for its heavenly bed, a sleep experience that’s built on multiple layers of mattress, bedding and pillow bliss. At 11 p.m. on our first luxe night, I called to beg the night manager to strip our bed. An unheavenly odor permeated the sheets, making sleep impossible. The next day, we were moved to another room; regrettably, the not-so-sweet scent followed us across the hall. A self-professed cleanaholic with a sharp nose, I recognized the problem. It gets really warm inside a heavenly bed, with its thick duvet and many layers of upscale linens. The duvet traps perspiration. Follow that line and you begin to conclude that hotels can’t cost effectively launder a duvet on a daily basis as it does sheets and pillow linens.
The heavenly bed points to an important discipline for strategic marketers, brand managers and CEOs: calculating what can go wrong. It’s a marvelous thing to be a person of vision, even better to see the line to the finish. But after the first flush of a new vision passes, it’s time to start the homework—to count the costs, understand the risks, study the competitive environment, jog around the whole vision with a few experts to look for both opportunities and pitfalls, and then, most important, slow to walk a mile in the brand consumer’s shoes. What is the consumer experience? What will the consumer say is great about this new vision of product or service brilliance? What will diminish his experience or worse, cause his confidence in my company to falter?
Several weeks before our not-so-heavenly bed experience, I booked two more room nights at this same hotel for an end-October visit back to South Carolina. It really is a beautiful hotel, but now I’m torn: cancel the reservation or travel with a bottle of Febreeze.
Curiously enough, this particular “pea” in my sleep experience was hinted at as early as 1749. I found this on Wikipedia when I Googled “duvet”:
“In Westphalia, an English travel-writer observed with surprise in 1749,
“There is one thing very particular to them, that they do not cover themselves with bed-cloaths, but lay one feather-bed over, and another under. This is comfortable enough in winter, but how they can bear their feather-beds over them in summer, as is generally practised, I cannot conceive.” —Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour 1749, vol II. p66 [1]
