Some zaftig mannequins are getting serious love from shoppers all around the world. More than 16,000 people have shared the image you see here, enthusiastically embracing the new profile on display at a Swedish retailer. ““Finally, mannequins showing how clothes fit on real women. I’m changing where I shop!”
It’s easy to forget that something as ordinary as a mannequin is a messaging vehicle. Fixtures are, almost by definition, made to be taken for granted. But as retailers, we can afford to leave no aspect of our operations unexamined. The typical mannequin used in America is a size 4 or 6. Some brands don’t even bother with that—they use strategically arranged poles and hangers to display their wares.
When shoppers look at these images, what are they seeing? Women come in all shapes and sizes, with the greatest number coming in at size 14. These women are continually bombarded with images of women who don’t look like them. Between airbrushes and makeup artists, ‘perfection’ is to be found everywhere but their own mirror. There’s a tremendous amount of cultural and social baggage that our customers are carrying with them at all times, an internalized narrative that dictates how they’re supposed to look and in what ways they fall short.
When they come into the store and encounter mannequins that are less than half the size they themselves are, the cultural narrative they’ve come to expect—the one that tells them they’re not good enough, that they’re failing at the ‘be a beautiful woman’ game—continues uninterrupted and unchallenged. It’s a seamless delivery of a negative narrative so ubiquitous that shoppers take it as an inevitability. Inevitable, that is, until they encounter an alternative.
Then it’s a different story.
Giving Customers a Reason to Choose You
Malcolm Gladwell tells a famous story about Howard Moskowitz, the food scientist who discovered for Prego that what customers really, really wanted was a chunky spaghetti sauce. Armed with this information, Prego introduced a chunky sauce, and had some of its most profitable years ever. Part of the reason Moskowitz was so successful in his research was that he was willing to question everything. No variable was fixed. Everything that could be questioned would be questioned.
It was this process—an early analog to the process we call Brand Modeling—that revealed the unexploited growth opportunities available to Prego. Bringing that same approach to retail means objectively analyzing every aspect of a store’s performance to identify what messaging is being shared with the customer, and assess the effectiveness of that messaging. Couple this with an insightful statistical analysis of customer behavioral patterns, thought processes, and beliefs, and the result is a revelation of the operational changes you can make to better attract and satisfy your customers.
In other words, if the mannequins you’re using tell your customers they’re fat failures, you might want to change your messaging. Universally, we’re drawn to images, iconography, and representations of people who physically resemble us. The larger mannequins are in alignment with how many customers see themselves. Presenting this image in a positive, celebratory way makes customers feel that they also are worth celebrating.
As a shopper, which experience would you prefer? We’re not different than our customers. They’re people, just like we are. Remembering that is the key to humanistic marketing and successful retail brand building.