I’m guessing that he will, Mr. Ed, since you seem to be anticipating it. But pictures and previous posts don’t lie.
This thread is here for the world to see.
Good luck with the mattress business.
Interesting that Saatva seems to generate quite a bit of conversation…
I recently took delivery of a Saatva mattress set. While it’s probably too early for me to speak of the bed’s quality, there is one thing about their marketing practices that I find shall we say, misused. They solicit reviews of their order process (pre-delivery) and then suggest those as ratings/reviews of the product itself:
- the company often touts that theirs is the “best reviewed mattress” on the internet (or similar). I think their employee even mentioned that on this thread; also highlighted on their web site
- they point to Google Ratings stats to substantiate their claim
- those ratings take into account ratings posted to another site - Pricegrabber
- as a consumer who just placed an order, I immediately received an e-mail asking me to submit a review - with an optional star rating - of my “experience thus far”. They did not pressure me to do so, of course - just suggested. At that point, all that happened is that I submitted an order, and received an acknowledgement. Had I submitted a review at that point, it would have shown up on Pricegrabber, and star rating, if any, would have been included in the overall merchant rating that feeds into the Google Ratings they tout.
And, so, scrolling through 1000s of their reviews, it is easy to spot many with 5-star ratings coupled with comments like this - certainly implying that the review was written before the consumer had the chance to try out the product.
So, while a shopper / prospective customer may be duly impressed with touted rating, he or she may not realize that some portion of those ratings is not of the mattress, but of the company’s process up to delivery only. It would be interesting to see how those ratings would change if one were to exclude submissions made prior to delivery dates ;-
I think it would be more appropriate for the company to segregate reviews & ratings submitted prior to delivery of product, or to stop representing those totals as reviews of their product itself.
please let me interject it’sbillhill and Saatva Ed. to sum this up quickly and move on.
The initial reason for Ed to contact me with concern over the post on another board back in November was solely my fault, I did not contact the company when I was upset over a bad delivery experience instead I posted a somewhat colorful re-enactment of the scenario. I tend to get colorful and verbose and that was my fault and Ed called me on it, I did not give Saatva a chance on that one. Ed and I may not have hit it off well at that point however he did make an offer to me to compensate for the damages from the delivery and inconvenience. in all fairness the tried to satisfy and I declined at that point. As far as you asked, would he have offered a full refund this time if not for the review posting? no, because it was clearly stated and agreed to that if I donate the bed Ed would send me a FINAL re-imbursement which would be added to a previous re-imbursement that we agreed upon due to the earlier damages and inconvenience. I did not contact Ed with my disappointment because it was a final agreement and expected him not to respond, AGAIN I did not give him a chance to correct it even though it was termed FINAL I should have responded to him first then post a comment but I was angry and did what most do. Agreed it should never have come to this in a customer service situation but it did and I think we both responded poorly. Maybe I as well as others seem to misunderstand Ed’s intentions and I learn from this that email may not be the best form of communication because so much “feeling” is lost in translation so you tend to gravitate towards the negative side of the situation.
it is as much my fault for the escalation of this matter because I chose the easy path which was to convey my disgruntled message without giving the other party a chance. take it for what it’s worth. would I have posted this without Ed’s offer to refund you will ask, No because I would not have thought I was wrong if I had not been called on it.
P.S. agreed I should not have had to pull teeth to get what I wanted from this company but maybe I was going about it wrong and not knowing exactly what I wanted because I actually wanted a Saatva Mattress and was getting frustrated that is wasn’t working for me as well as others because I actually liked the product I received initially and have mentioned that in many posts but it was giving me health problems and it was better than what I have replaced it with. I think the problem started when I put Ed on the defensive due to comments I posted initially. Ed and I have very Similar strong personalities and that can be a problem because neither party wants to submit. So, am I posting because they offered me a refund? maybe so, I think I owe that to them, to clearly state what was left out so that maybe you all can see the truth that there ARE two sides and we only live in one of them! think of me what you will, for me mission accomplished, yes, and I will write a more appropriate review that posts the good things I felt about the product as I did when I received it, just leaving out the colorful delivery aspects and some bashing, and explain to people what they can expect, which is the purpose of the forums anyway isn’t it? and why would I not post? after all didn’t I get from them what I wanted and should I not tell people that?
[quote]And, so, scrolling through 1000s of their reviews, it is easy to spot many with 5-star ratings coupled with comments like this - certainly implying that the review was written before the consumer had the chance to try out the product.
So, while a shopper / prospective customer may be duly impressed with touted rating, he or she may not realize that some portion of those ratings is not of the mattress, but of the company’s process up to delivery only. It would be interesting to see how those ratings would change if one were to exclude submissions made prior to delivery dates ;-
I think it would be more appropriate for the company to segregate reviews & ratings submitted prior to delivery of product, or to stop representing those totals as reviews of their product itself.[/quote]
There lies the core problem with this Saatva.
It is a company building reputation upon reviews that are mostly based on pre-delivery or even usage of a few months.
I too was encouraged to write a review prior to delivery. Made no sense to me to write a review about the ordering experience.
I am not convinced that Saatva isn’t overpopulating those reviews themselves, as reading some of them, they seem too over-the-top to be believable.
You state 3 times that this is all your fault. You tried to buy a mattress, it turned out to be a piece of crap and somehow that is all your fault. I get that you want your money and that you have to post what you’re told to post to get it.
I want everyone reading these reviews to look at one thing - the structure of the posts from poppanaldo before Ed Brians joined the forum (which is pretty much tantamount to allowing advertising) and the structure of the retraction post. poppanaldo uses short, non rambling sentences. Ed Brians uses long, incohesive rambling sentences. I’d be willing to bet anyone that the retraction post submitted by poppanaldo was in fact written by Ed Brians, likely as a condition to get his money back.
Now, anyone who knows anything about statistics and probability distributions knows full well that it is impossible to have a 100% satisfaction rating. Not possible, unless of course it’s one review or a very small sample size. But a large number of reviews will converge to a normal distribution. That is a fact. A reasonable satisfaction rating is between 90-95%. Anything more than that, and you have to question the legitimacy of the positive review. It’s not just that the reviews are over the top, it’s that they are written in a very similar style, a style very much like the postings of Mr. Brians in this forum. I don’t know him personally, but my guess is he’s foreign given his very odd and incoherent matching of words in sentences. Does this make him a bad guy? Of course not. But it does make it a lot easier to follow his writing style because it is specific to his learning of English sentence structure.
Finally, all Saatva has done is capitalize on a very powerful metric and exploit it. It’s something Amazon figured out a long time ago. Higher positive reviews means higher sales. Saatva could be selling dog $hit in a box with the reviews they have because other people believe that someone bought it and that it’s the best thing ever. This is a marketing company, first and foremost. Their beds are no different than any other mass produced by any reputable company. They will claim otherwise but this must be true. Is it all possible that only these marketing majors and business people know how to make a bed when no one else in the world could figure it out? Again, not possible.
They may be a good company, they may be a bad company, it depends on your point of view. What they are doing is not illegal but it is deceptive inasmuch as they are manipulating and exploiting the positive review system, something that many very smart people are working very hard to prevent, through automated algorithms that are specifically designed to look for the very patterns that Mr. Brians is creating.
I totally agree with this.
Saatva is indeed more of a marketing machine than it is a mattress company. It’s all about getting positive reviews on the Internet.
As I said, I own a Saatva mattress. It’s no better than other mattresses I have owned. Certainly not the second coming in the mattress industry as so many reviews on the Internet suggest:
Some of these reviews are so over-the-top that it’s laughable. This one is my favorite…
[quote]I have a real problem with my new mattress. My 80 lb greyhound loves it and we can’t keep him from jumping up on the bed in the middle of the night. Every night he jumps up, we make him get down…he waits until he knows we are asleep…then he jumps back up and steals the covers and tries to push us off the bed. With our old bed, he would just accept that he couldn’t sleep in the bed, but he LOVES the new Saatva so much it is impossible to keep him off of it. We have had our new bed for almost 3 weeks and we absolutely love it! My in-laws bought one just last week because our raves! My cousin is going to buy one soon and 2 of my friends plan to in the near future as well.
[/quote]
I’m not saying it’s a fake review, but it’s an example of many of the reviews posted on the site above.
When there are so many outlandishly positive reviews and hardly any negatives, it makes one wonder.
@WallyW We run an online only business where customer satisfaction is
extremely important. We ask for feedback so that we know our systems
and customer service department are working optimally. Many customers
go back and update their reviews after longer periods of time with the
mattress. If you look at just the longer term owners, we still have a
very high satisfaction rate. I completely agree that some of the
reviews are over the top, but we can’t do anything about that.
@jdicecco and @itsbillhill Ed spoke with poppanaldo, but we had
nothing to do with writing the response. poppanaldo tried two
different versions of our mattress. The second mattress was defective,
and we came to an agreement where he chose a partial discount and to
have the original mattress redelivered. Unfortunately, that mattress
did not work for him in the end, and he ended up donating the mattress
and getting a full refund.
@MatterssHunter and @jdiecco As Ed said previously, the reason we have
few negative review is not because we are perfect. It is because we do
everything we can to make it right when a customer is unhappy. We
cannot please every customer and sometimes we make mistakes, but we
always make an effort and we are always improving.
Thank You,
Kris Brower
CTO Saatva Mattress
“My 80 lb greyhound loves it and we can’t keep him from jumping up on the bed in the middle of the night. Every night he jumps up, we make him get down…he waits until he knows we are asleep…then he jumps back up and steals the covers and tries to push us off the bed. With our old bed, he would just accept that he couldn’t sleep in the bed, but he LOVES the new Saatva so much it is impossible to keep him off of it.”
That truly is ridiculous. Thanks for posting it.
Thanks for you reply, @SaatvaKris, although I am not sure how it relates to my post - since I did not say anything about “negative reviews”. I was not expecting a reply from anyone @ Saatva (or looking for one). However since you did respond, I’d love your feedback on the specific marketing practice I described. Do you think, given what I described, that it is appropriate as-is, or is it in need of review?
thank you
-nikita
There is no way the person who wrote poppanaldo’s first reviews and the person who wrote the retracted review are the same person. No way. The writing style and word choice is COMPLETELY different. For instance, in the primary, poppanaldo uses words that are easy to understand and common (crap, chuckle, kidding, straight-shooter, super duper leakproof mattress pad, stiffed, etc.). The retraction uses words like interject, verbose, colorful-reenactment, gravitate, “convey my disgruntled message”, “communication … lost in translation, etc.” As if there is still any doubt, the primary posts by poppanaldo do not use one single capitalized word.
In fact, the retraction post sounds exactly like previous responses from Ed Brians …
"Poppanaldo and I went through so much back and forth. Again, there is the “other side " to the story and Poppanaldo nor myself are liars or fabricators of stories. I easily stand by Saatva’s reputation and my good hope is Poppanaldo will support my comments if he directly responds on this site.”
and the retraction …
“it is as much my fault for the escalation of this matter because I chose the easy path which was to convey my disgruntled message without giving the other party a chance. take it for what it’s worth. would I have posted this without Ed’s offer to refund you will ask, No because I would not have thought I was wrong if I had not been called on it.”
@SaatvaKris This response was not written by the original poppanaldo. You claim that Ed Brians was not involved yet it has remarkably similar sentence structure. The evidence does not support your position. By the way, why is your company so aggressive at addressing comments on a forum meant for consumers? Quite frankly, it does more to reinforce the impression that your company engages in intimidation and bullying than it does refute it. Lastly, as “Chief Technology Officer” it appears your primary role is not mattresses but rather spinning websites - for other companies besides Saatva. This tells me that Saatva is primarily an internet business that just happens to sell mattresses, not a mattress business that happens to sell on the internet. Which is fine, but you shouldn’t pretend it is otherwise.
the amount of company involvement on this thread is a bit disturbing. I am glad I didn’t buy a Saatva mattress. All marketing and hype, but nothing to back it up. What set bells off for me was the extreme marketing + positive reviews. It just seemed very suspicious to me.
This thread sort of proved my suspicions correct.
Thats why I’m very glad it is here. This will turn up in searches when a consumer is looking to buy.
Their marketing is so ultra-aggressive on all fronts that it’s actually a turn-off.
I bought into the marketing hype the first time. However, I can see what a campaign machine Saatva is, and I won’t buy into it again.
As I have said, the mattress is no better than anything else I have paid more money for. The excessively glowing reviews that often border on inane tell me that there is more at work here than meets the eye.
I mean, look at this review and tell me if it looks more like an advertisement campaign than an actual review
http://debbie-debbiedoos.com/2013/10/review-on-saatva-luxury-mattress.html
And there are a few other review sites that look almost exactly the same.
I am rather suspicious that most of the posted reviews around the Internet are not from actual customers.
In fact, as I edit this thread I am looking for one review from the site I linked in a previous post that had me laughing my arse off…
It had something to do with a couple that bought Saatva mattresses and now when family comes over they demand that they only sleep in the rooms that have those mattresses in them.
It was was just way over the top. I’m looking for it, cause I think it’s worth sharing…
Post has been removed by USER.
I removed this post because Saatva fixed my problem, not because of any requests made to me by them or Ed or in exchange for remuneration as some members choose to think. there were three posts I removed because maybe there were unfair comments made by me while I was angry at them. so long ago I don’t even remember them. but the fact is I have said enough in the posts that I left and I feel that others will contribute their own experiences to complete the puzzle. I still follow the forum but I don’t contribute to it pertinent to the product. I do enjoy the banter from the amusing few that still seem to police this forum.
Not buying it. Evidence is mounting. @Poppanaldo, you have your money back. In the end, that’s all that matters. Your saga is over with Saatva.
For others who might be getting involved with them, they may have a good experience, they may have a bad experience but they should go into this with ALL the information.
I have had personal email exchanges with Ed Brians. Very odd character, to be sure. That’s my opinion and it is shared by many, though not all, who have had to deal with him directly. Nothing wrong with being odd but when you combine odd with manipulative there is a problem. There is more than enough evidence here on this one thread to bear that out.
I have a pretty good idea from my dealings with Ed what is happening here and others will be able to make up their own minds. This is beyond linguistics, and it’s fair to point out a lead in question by Ed Brian predicting a retracted response, followed by a retracted response is more than most people would feel comfortable chalking up to coincidence. This has been nothing more than damage control. And NONE of this would have been exposed if Saatva themselves had not injected themselves into a consumer forum. That much is clear to anyone who reads this thread.
This has gotten creepy. Saatva is making this so much worse by writing these responses and having poppanaldo claim that he wrote them. Each one gets longer and the attempt at humor makes me feel like I need to take a shower.
Hello all,
This has been and is an interesting thread but I just want to add a caution for those who are posting here about stating opinions as opinions rather than stating them as facts (when they can’t be known for certain) or turning the conversation into a commentary about the personalities or motive of the members that are posting which can easily end up crossing the line of the forum rules about personal attacks or inflammatory posts. I realize it can be a fine line and I don’t in any way want to limit free discussion or even expressions of doubt that challenge what is being said but I would also keep in mind that people can make up their own minds about the “truth” or “intent” of what is posted based on the content of the posts themselves and their own “best judgement”.
We may each have different ways of expressing ourselves or “translating” what we read.
Phoenix
Well now I’m really confused. We have a forum member who admits to allowing Saatva to change his review for money then the company in question joins in and thoroughly muddies the water. We have a very real conflict here with certain “facts” and certain “opinions”. Now I was under the impression that the whole point of this forum was specifically to remove the BS surrounding the mattress industry. It seems to me that the only thing that’s happening here is adding to the BS factor.
What we know as “facts” (at least according to first person accounts): a forum member posted a bad review of Saatva and later retracted it. This same reviewer admitted to previously allowing Saatva to modify his original review. Saatva has engaged in aggressive and misleading statements regarding their review history. The “fact”, directly from Saatva, that they do not have one negative review can be disproven just in this thread. (I don’t know what to call someone who states things that can easily be disproved other than odd.) Ed Brians has a difficult time with American expressions and mixes metaphors. Those are facts directly substantiated from this thread.
Opinions based on facts: Saatva is once again engaging in manipulative behavior. This is not a leap and any person would likely come to this opinion from this thread. Saatva is an internet company that sells mattresses not a mattress company working through the internet. This is easily extrapolated from the fact that Saatva “executives” are engaged in other internet businesses that are not mattress-related - easily verifiable with a quick search of LinkedIn and other social media sites.
My opinion based on my training and knowledge of human behavior: a forum member had written a negative review because he was unable to return his bed or get it exchanged. That set off a series of events involving another bed, a partial refund, the return of the original bed and finally the donation of said bed to a local charity. Mixed in all of this was deal that exchanged money for changing a negative review. When that failed to exact the complete refund, the member restated his original dissatisfaction. This was enough to pull Saatva into the fray to work substantial damage control. The member was then offered his final reimbursement to remove this final negative review - with or without the help of Saatva directly. It seems to me that Saatva understands if they give a refund right away, there is no guarantee that the reviewer won’t just turn around and post another poor review. This seems to run like an insurance company, refusing to pay until they absolutely must. Of course, this is just an opinion, but it damn sure fits the evidence.
Hi jdicecco,
I’m not sure if the “Well now I’m really confused.” was in reference to my post but if it was then I should probably clarify that the reason I posted what I did was just as a caution to make sure that poppanaldo didn’t become the issue or the “target” of the discussion and to make clear that something like this …
or a conclusion based on a linguistic analysis of his words isn’t presented as facts.
He did post here voluntarily and also made clear in his last post (and others) that he still wasn’t happy about the situation and points a finger at himself and his own actions as well as Saatva which isn’t usually an indication of someone that is posting someone else’s words.
Regardless of this though … the goal of my post was to add a caution based on many years of being part of and running forums so that the thread would stay focused on the legitimate issues that have been raised and that poppanaldo himself didn’t become the main issue under discussion or end up in a position that he felt the need to defend himself against accusations that nobody can “prove” or “disprove”.
Phoenix