by The Avocado Mattress podcast, “A Little Green,” is a pleasant listen, and it doesn’t feel like listening to a commercial.
The Avocado Mattress company focuses on sustainable and eco-friendly mattresses, bedding and furniture. But its podcast content is broader: It covers a wide range of topics related to nature, art, wellness, sustainability and environmental issues. It opens with a traditional ad roll for the brand, but the podcast is not making a hard sale at all. The episodes are sweet and feature lullabylike storytelling.
The crunchy brand
Avocado understands the assignment in producing a podcast; they understand who they are talking to: a savvy crowd that doesn’t require hand-holding when it comes to finding out where to buy; an audience that cares about getting into the weeds of environmental, wellness and social issues. They like stories. They want to hear from experts and do their part to help the environment. Podcast subscribers are hungry to get in on the conversation about health and wellness.
Podcast episodes are not infomercials; they are much softer than that — the form, in and of itself, feels appropriately on brand for Avocado. Each episode features extraordinary people’s stories about their connectivity with nature. There is very little — if any — mention of specific product features or where to buy because those are not the things people talk about. They talk about the “thing or person’s story they learned about on a podcast” that day.
Where will they go next? Podcasting as a brand extension tool
A podcast is a free, long format. It is perfect for a brand’s expansion. It’s ripe soil to sow the seeds for other potential verticals. In Avocado’s case, that means not only ancillary products for the bedroom, but also, potentially, in travel, food, wellness, fashion, in medicine even. The thesis statement is clear, but still broad enough that anything that fits under the umbrella of good-for-people-and-planet could be a potential business under the Avocado umbrella.
Data tracking: podcasting in the attention economy
The most important metric you can measure is how much of the consumer’s attention you are capturing. The podcast comes built-in with the ability to track the popularity of certain episodes over time.
This is a great way to market research new product development ideas — i.e. Did more people listen to the episode about canoes in Hawaii? And did listenership drop off on the episode about the woman raising butterflies while incarcerated?
It is obvious that neither of these stories — both from recent podcast episodes — has any direct link to mattresses. Still, perhaps the subjects sleep on Avocado mattresses, and what’s more: Perhaps the people listening to their stories and sharing them second-hand with their family, friends and co-workers also sleep on Avocado mattresses.
