According to a recent United Press International posting, a number of British retailers are appealing to men’s vanity by labeling trousers as a smaller size than they really are. Debenhams, Next, and Topman were selling pants up to one inch larger than labeled. “Manity sizing” corresponds to vanity sizing, used with marketing and selling women’s clothing. The objective is to have shoppers say, “I feel better about myself when shopping at that store rather than elsewhere, so I’ll make more of my purchases there.”
However, manity sizing might not meet this objective. The UPI posting reports the pants patrols are becoming frustrated with how the size-to-label correspondence varies so broadly, shall we say, from one retailer to another.
So this vanity appeal might actually fall closer to silly soup displays than to vanity sizing: Long ago, I’d hear grocery store operators claim that shoppers buy more varieties of soup when the varieties are shelved in random order rather than alphabetically. The explanation went like this: The shopper is interested in finding a particular variety. Maybe chicken noodle, maybe tomato, maybe clam chowder. They look for the particular variety, but because there’s no order, the shopper’s eyes run over many varieties. As they do so, they start thinking, “Gee, maybe I could use that variety, too.” They end up selecting extras.
But a random arrangement irritates shoppers when there’s a logical order to the assortment. Let’s say you run a hardware store and somebody comes in looking for a particular size screw. “Oh, they’re all mixed up on the shelves,” you’d say. “Keep looking until you find it.”
The, umm, biggest practitioners of manity sizing reported in the UPI article were, perhaps not surprisingly, supermarkets. Tesco and Asda were selling pants up to two inches larger than announced. Maybe the larger pants could go along with featuring larger food packages.
If you’re doing this to appeal to vanity for profitability, it, too, might be in vain. With shoppers who are sensitive about their girth, you’ll make more money from the smaller package sizes. Researchers at Technical University of Lisbon and at Tilburg University in the Netherlands found that people who got started on small packages ended up eating more than did those who dug into the large package. The study participants had said they believed small packages would help them limit their consumption, but the opposite proved to be true.
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