Marketing massage as a daily health practice - Furniture Today

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Cozzia USA has adapted its Cozzia Wellness Center digital POP display to promote its growing business in zero-gravity recliners.


HIGH POINT — Massage chair manufacturers are keen to sharpen consumer awareness of the therapeutic benefits of massage with marketing campaigns that emphasize the benefits of massage, not as a luxury, but as a daily health practice.

From greater relaxation to improved circulation and better sleep, massage chairs are marketed as a way for consumers to take their well-being into their own hands.

HumanTouch Massage Chairs anchors its marketing on wellness through an emphasis on healthy habits, including using a massage chair every day.

“Human Touch also stresses the importance of recovery, whether from exercise, injury, or stress as an essential part of a wellness routine,” said Victoria Lladoc, director of marketing. “Recovery is key to better performance.”

She noted that the company tagline — “Your best. Every day.” — emphasizes the importance of a person’s well-being and turns what may seem to be an infrequent luxury into part of a daily routine.

As well as developing its own proprietary massage mechanism, Infinity Massage Chairs uses its consumer surveys about its product as part of its marketing approach, providing customers with information from other products as well as point of purchase materials such as “Top 20 Reasons to Own a Massage Chair.”

“Health and wellness are vital to the way we approach the market,” said Michael Milone, vice president for retail sales and business development for the company. “It’s a huge part of why people go to masseuses.”

Setting the stage for that initial customer experience is also important to Infinity Massage Chair’s marketing.

“We found that it’s difficult to get RSAs to learn every product detail, so we built a program where the sales associate invites the customer to sit in the Xfinity chair,” said Milone. “A five-minute automated demo program ‘talks’ to the consumer as each phase of the massage is happening, explaining the benefits.”

This hands-on demo enables the customer to feel comfortable with the mechanisms from the start and helps to demystify the massage chairs.

At Master Motion Studio 54, providing customers a choice in their wellness seating is key to its marketing efforts. The company offers massage sofas, loveseats, sectionals, home theater and even sleeper sofas.

“Our customers love the fact that they can watch a football game or a movie, (while getting a) massage,” said Michael Nanni, president and CEO.

The company has spent the past five years promoting and advertising on social media and through e-commerce, bringing home its message of incorporating massage into everyday seating rather than as a separate, specific health practice.

Targeted messaging

CozziaUSA was an early promoter of the wellness benefits of massage in its marketing. Bob Bruns, president, said, “Starting in 2014, we worked to determine who the customer was for massage chairs in the U.S.”

He added that the company has used the marketing research it did with Furniture Today to dive deeper into the health and wellness category, with the goal of becoming a leader in the industry. CozziaUSA continues to plan its marketing campaign around the research and builds its advertising efforts around it for the rest of the year.

Emphasizing the wide variety of choices for customers and its long history in the massage chair market are key to CozziaUSA’s approach. Bruns said, “We actually design our product and highlight our technological advances” with the end user.

For the founder of X-Chair, Anthony Mazlish, massage chairs were an outgrowth of the company’s initial focus on massage/cooling desk chairs.

In November 2021, the company launched its X77 massage chair with a television ad mimicking a James Bond type character who, after adventuring, uses the massage chair to relax.

“We wanted to grab the consumers attention with our ad and not focus so much on the health and wellness component,” said Mazlish, figuring that the entertaining ad would be a way to get the consumers interested in massage chairs.

For the X77massage chair, X-Chair’s message is less on the technical aspects and more on the chairs’ massage programs, designed by a Shiatsu master from Japan. Even though the initial marketing is lighter on the technical aspects, the company literature extols the salutary health benefits of massage.

“Customers have had an overwhelmingly positive response to making massage a part of their daily routine,” concluded Human Touch’s Lladoc. “Over the past two years, especially, people have become hyper-aware of the importance of their health and well-being.”