Usually it would be off topic and rude, but this is a thread specifically dedicated to the use of scientifically studied use of sex appeal in marketing.
Maybe that was part of Jobs’ “reality distortion field”: testosterone makes you bald. Ergo, he looked as dominant as someone with his physique could look.
I find that kind of research disgusting, because their ONLY purpose is to manipulate customers.
I also question the ethics of such studies: how can you justify this, ethically?
Treating your customers like that is also simply unacceptable. Same problem with those psychologists working on games rewards in order to make you spend more.
On a more serious note, I don't think personal sensibility is a good reason not to perform an experiment, or publish something. The main test should be, "is it true"? And, "What does the evidence show"?
A good reason might be if the subjects' rights were somehow violated, which IRB reviews in academic science are designed to prevent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board). Human experimentation is, in general, a highly regulated endeavor.
I strongly object to not doing science, or some kind of investigation, because one person finds it "disgusting". I think this attitude is getting more common, despite its harms.
One benefit of this study is that people who are made aware of it may be more conscious of their bias when shopping. This could mitigate the effects. The act of doing the study could have positive effects depending on what the study is used for after.
The study itself didn't harm anyone. It just measured an effect by changing a variable. The information it produced could produce positive change or it could produce negative change.
Tricking people shopping for status items into buying higher priced status items does "collective damage"?
I'm failing to see who's the victim here.
--edit--
This actually reminds me of one of my sister's stories; one of her college roommates was running late so just put her hair up in a ponytail and made noticeably better tips that night than she usually did at her bartending job so what do you suppose she did as a result of this observation?
1. What are the "social or political consequences" of this study? Can you explain those? Or perhaps clarify the asserted "collective damage"?
2. How do you weigh the benefits of better understanding against "collective damage" or "social or political consequences"?
These are real questions we have to answer as we make policy about research. I start from the position that more complete understanding of behavior/psychology is a good thing. There are times when human rights might stop scientific inquiry, but in my mind, the bar for that has to be set pretty high, because it's hard to know in advance what progress might come from better understanding.
In any case, I don't think taste or personal repugnance should have any bearing on scientific inquiry. "Rights" in the deontological sense perhaps, or breaking laws, but not taste.
Gee then you must hate all focus groups and the entire advertising industry because that is the sole purpose of not just this one study, but an entire industry.
That kind of research will be done regardless. I'd rather their results be publicized and customers be cognizant of their own biases and the way they are being manipulated.
Would you object to a bookstore that tests playing low volume classical music to see how it affects sales?
If it increases sales and so they keep playing it, is that manipulating customers and unethical?
What if the reason it increases sales is that it makes the customers find the bookstore more pleasant and relaxing, and so it makes the customers happy to spend more time there, which results in them being more likely to find a book they want to buy?
I must be a woman then, because I find the bulky man to be off-putting. I'd still buy from him, but I wouldn't enjoy the interaction. I'd much prefer to buy from the non-dominant man.
Manipulating people like this is wrong, but then so are most marketing techniques.
Although the exact numbers and who was affected were probably unknown, I can't help but think the general effect was already known because of the shape of mannequins.
The correlation is so strong that scientists can measure the fingers of sprinters and then predict who will win a race between them with near perfect accuracy, based solely on digit ratio, before the race has even begun.
*amniotic testosterone levels, apparently, and the ratio is supposedly unaffected by post-birth levels.
"The 2D:4D digit ratio is the ratio of the length of the second (index) finger and the fourth (ring) finger. This ratio is, on average, different in men and women. (Men tend to have longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers, while women’s index fingers are about the same length as, or slightly longer than, their ring fingers.) The idea is that prenatal testosterone levels influence digit ratio."
I am not sure how much social status aspects change with sexual orientation. Inter-sex competition over social status clearly has some connection with the ability to attract a mate (like any other species), but the trick of gaining social status through status symbols seems more bound to general culture.
I am not sure how much social status aspects change with sexual orientation
If you are curious, read about the sexuality of the ancient Greeks, which was inextricably bound up with social status. From Wikipaedia:
Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act, that of active penetrator or passive penetrated.[6] This active/passive polarization corresponded with dominant and submissive social roles: the active (penetrative) role was associated with masculinity, higher social status, and adulthood, while the passive role was associated with femininity, lower social status, and youth.
I don't think A&F is the right name for this effect, because A&F intentionally sells products that fit big muscular guys, and tries to avoid selling products for and to small guys. (see the related comment about
FitchTheHomeless).
They don't want scrawny customers in public as brand mis-ambasssadors That's different from buying an expensive watch or couch or car because you feel inferior sized.
Is that true? My younger brother who was very scrawny in High School had a wardrobe that consisted almost exclusively of A&F, and I don't remember any of the clothes looking ill-fitting.
Looking through their website, the majority of their clothes seem to come in Extra Small and only go up to XL. Maybe their sizing is really off? The size guide didn't seem to be off from what plenty of other retailers are using though.
That a greater proportion of men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers than do women was noted in the scientific literature several times through the late 1800s,[16][17] with the statistically significant sex difference in a sample of 201 men and 109 women established by 1930,[18] after which time the sex difference appears to have been largely forgotten or ignored.
Anyone got a link to the “research” cited in here? From the article it doesn’t seem like the most rigourous methodology, and I don’t see any p or n values listed.
Honestly if this was actually true every male shop assistant working on commission would already be ripped because they would be selling double that of the scrawny ones, who would have been fired months ago.
Abercrombie and Fitch share price is at a 17 year low and they have put themselves up for sale. I don't think their strategy is working out too well for them in a market where foreign competitors like Zara and H&M entered with much more effective marketing messages.
Abercrombie and Fitch "failed to keep up with changing preferences among customers, and has suffered as a result, plagued with a number of periods of declining sales."
I do not know where you are getting this information but ANF stock is not at a 17 year low. The stock price has more than doubled from last year's (and all the time) low.
In the case of female shoppers, the measured purchase patterns were exactly same, regardless of the amount of muscle at the entrance. On the other hand, male shoppers were clearly influenced.“
“This alone provides a valuable marketing insight. Women clearly don’t care that much about the employees’ physical appearance – from a shopping point of view, that is. Men are much more easily swayed.”
To back that assertion, I would want to see the experiment repeated with female sales employees. In that situation, would women shoppers respond in a similar way to attractive and confident female employees as the men did to dominant male employees?
Also, A&F already attracts customers who are into bodybuilding, so I’m not surprised that customers are sensitive to muscular staff. The experiment should also be attempted in a non-fitness-oriented shop like H&M.
This reminds me of the observation you often see that when men get into bodybuilding or grow their beards it's often not women, but other men, who seem most impressed.
Research aside, isn't this intuitive? My sexuality doesn't come into the feeling I have when I go clothes shopping. If they've got guys wearing the merchandise and they look attractive and confident, I'm going to feel empowered by that - they look hot in those clothes and so I'm interested.
I might even feel confident in myself because I've realised I can feel that for myself. The physique doesn't even matter, it's just the energy of it.
If they hire a bunch of models who give off nothing more than anxiety and discomfort in themselves then my first thought isn't that they're making great clothes look good.
I can't imagine that we as men have this different compared to women who shop for clothes. Attraction, sexuality, and aspiration is in your face at all times there. The main difference I see is that a man will rarely call another man attractive, as if the instant assumption is that admiring them makes you gay. Plenty of men out there who look and feel awesome without needing to challenge your heterosexuality.
The research presented in the article seems to be going against this intuition: the effect is only apparent when it's a physically dominating male; not necessarily physically attractive.
> Note that physical dominance isn’t the same as physical attractiveness. While many high-status product categories have certainly embraced the latter for ages, it’s the tallness and muscularity what truly matters for the Abercrombie & Fitch effect to take place.
The article doesn’t go as far as to make any explanations so I’ll drop what I think is happening: the tall masculine figure is making the targeted men insecure (the shorter, lower test level men) about their masculinity and they make up for it by buying luxury goods, which is an alternative expression of masculinity (think expensive whiskies and fine taste).
It of course doesn’t affect women because they aren’t threatened, and it doesn’t affect men who are already physically masculine because they’re secure there.
And now I wonder if you can run variations:
1. Have some well dressed guy in a suit lead underdressed buff guys buy clothing because they’re insecure about their appearance
2. Have skinny women lead more overweight women to buy health products that promote weight loss
Agreed, this seems to be stemming from a fairly common compensation mechanism. I would be very interested in the results of the questions you bring up.
I'd venture the result would be:
1. Yes
2. No
It's worth noting that the company endured years of flagging sales and stock price while employing this tactic. They somewhat recently made a concerted effort to move away from this image. And after doing so saw their numbers improve:
>"While it once called its store front staff “models,” the company later announced in 2015 that it would no longer hire based on “body type or physical attractiveness.” [1]
I've only visited an A&F store once. The lighting was bizarrely low. It was like one of those 'horror house' rides at a crappy fair, with only the occasional dim spot on an exhibition of clothes. This extended to the dressing rooms.
Is this general for A&F? If so no wonder they've been doing poorly.
From the couple of pictures, the "dominant" men were a little taller than average, and fairly well muscled.
I wonder what would happen if you went even more extreme, such as staffing the store with men who look like, both physically and in dress, as if they just stepped out of a "Tom of Finland" drawing?
My guess is that if the gap between the salesman and the customer is much more than what the customer believes they realistically can achieve, the salesman will not be as effective as one who is more similar to the customer.
60 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadSomething irks me about this comment.
If someone had made the same remark but instead it was about a woman, I wonder what the response would be.
https://mobile.twitter.com/gramatik/status/89057764829611212...
I also question the ethics of such studies: how can you justify this, ethically?
Treating your customers like that is also simply unacceptable. Same problem with those psychologists working on games rewards in order to make you spend more.
DISGUSTING.
On a more serious note, I don't think personal sensibility is a good reason not to perform an experiment, or publish something. The main test should be, "is it true"? And, "What does the evidence show"?
A good reason might be if the subjects' rights were somehow violated, which IRB reviews in academic science are designed to prevent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board). Human experimentation is, in general, a highly regulated endeavor.
I strongly object to not doing science, or some kind of investigation, because one person finds it "disgusting". I think this attitude is getting more common, despite its harms.
There's an attitude that anything goes short of violating an individual's rights, even if your actions do collective damage.
Anyone who disagrees or resists this nihilistic attitude is then denigrated as weak-minded, "triggered" or insufficiently masculine.
I think this attitude is getting more common, despite its harms.
The study itself didn't harm anyone. It just measured an effect by changing a variable. The information it produced could produce positive change or it could produce negative change.
I'm failing to see who's the victim here.
--edit--
This actually reminds me of one of my sister's stories; one of her college roommates was running late so just put her hair up in a ponytail and made noticeably better tips that night than she usually did at her bartending job so what do you suppose she did as a result of this observation?
Ran double-blind controlled experiments published to a peer reviewed journal?
1. What are the "social or political consequences" of this study? Can you explain those? Or perhaps clarify the asserted "collective damage"?
2. How do you weigh the benefits of better understanding against "collective damage" or "social or political consequences"?
These are real questions we have to answer as we make policy about research. I start from the position that more complete understanding of behavior/psychology is a good thing. There are times when human rights might stop scientific inquiry, but in my mind, the bar for that has to be set pretty high, because it's hard to know in advance what progress might come from better understanding.
In any case, I don't think taste or personal repugnance should have any bearing on scientific inquiry. "Rights" in the deontological sense perhaps, or breaking laws, but not taste.
If it increases sales and so they keep playing it, is that manipulating customers and unethical?
What if the reason it increases sales is that it makes the customers find the bookstore more pleasant and relaxing, and so it makes the customers happy to spend more time there, which results in them being more likely to find a book they want to buy?
Manipulating people like this is wrong, but then so are most marketing techniques.
"The 2D:4D digit ratio is the ratio of the length of the second (index) finger and the fourth (ring) finger. This ratio is, on average, different in men and women. (Men tend to have longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers, while women’s index fingers are about the same length as, or slightly longer than, their ring fingers.) The idea is that prenatal testosterone levels influence digit ratio."
Straight: If I don't buy this he'll fsck my woman.
If you are curious, read about the sexuality of the ancient Greeks, which was inextricably bound up with social status. From Wikipaedia:
Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act, that of active penetrator or passive penetrated.[6] This active/passive polarization corresponded with dominant and submissive social roles: the active (penetrative) role was associated with masculinity, higher social status, and adulthood, while the passive role was associated with femininity, lower social status, and youth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Greec...
They don't want scrawny customers in public as brand mis-ambasssadors That's different from buying an expensive watch or couch or car because you feel inferior sized.
Looking through their website, the majority of their clothes seem to come in Extra Small and only go up to XL. Maybe their sizing is really off? The size guide didn't seem to be off from what plenty of other retailers are using though.
the scientists looked at the ratio between ring and index finger, which is correlated with one’s level of testosterone.
I wasn't aware of this. Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio
That a greater proportion of men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers than do women was noted in the scientific literature several times through the late 1800s,[16][17] with the statistically significant sex difference in a sample of 201 men and 109 women established by 1930,[18] after which time the sex difference appears to have been largely forgotten or ignored.
Honestly if this was actually true every male shop assistant working on commission would already be ripped because they would be selling double that of the scrawny ones, who would have been fired months ago.
https://nancyjsirianni.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/jmr_otter...
Abercrombie and Fitch "failed to keep up with changing preferences among customers, and has suffered as a result, plagued with a number of periods of declining sales."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/05/10/wh...
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/anf?ltr=1
“This alone provides a valuable marketing insight. Women clearly don’t care that much about the employees’ physical appearance – from a shopping point of view, that is. Men are much more easily swayed.”
To back that assertion, I would want to see the experiment repeated with female sales employees. In that situation, would women shoppers respond in a similar way to attractive and confident female employees as the men did to dominant male employees?
I might even feel confident in myself because I've realised I can feel that for myself. The physique doesn't even matter, it's just the energy of it.
If they hire a bunch of models who give off nothing more than anxiety and discomfort in themselves then my first thought isn't that they're making great clothes look good.
I can't imagine that we as men have this different compared to women who shop for clothes. Attraction, sexuality, and aspiration is in your face at all times there. The main difference I see is that a man will rarely call another man attractive, as if the instant assumption is that admiring them makes you gay. Plenty of men out there who look and feel awesome without needing to challenge your heterosexuality.
> Note that physical dominance isn’t the same as physical attractiveness. While many high-status product categories have certainly embraced the latter for ages, it’s the tallness and muscularity what truly matters for the Abercrombie & Fitch effect to take place.
It of course doesn’t affect women because they aren’t threatened, and it doesn’t affect men who are already physically masculine because they’re secure there.
And now I wonder if you can run variations:
1. Have some well dressed guy in a suit lead underdressed buff guys buy clothing because they’re insecure about their appearance
2. Have skinny women lead more overweight women to buy health products that promote weight loss
>"While it once called its store front staff “models,” the company later announced in 2015 that it would no longer hire based on “body type or physical attractiveness.” [1]
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/02/25/this-is-the-most-hated-retaile...
Is this general for A&F? If so no wonder they've been doing poorly.
I wonder what would happen if you went even more extreme, such as staffing the store with men who look like, both physically and in dress, as if they just stepped out of a "Tom of Finland" drawing?
My guess is that if the gap between the salesman and the customer is much more than what the customer believes they realistically can achieve, the salesman will not be as effective as one who is more similar to the customer.