The Abercrombie & Fitch Effect: The Impact of Physical Dominance on Male Customers' Status-Signaling Consumption
By Tobias Otterbring, Christine Ringler, Nancy J. Sirianni, Anders Gustafsson. 2018
113 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Consumer lay theory suggests that women will spend more money than men in the presence of a physically dominant male employee, whereas theories of intrasexual competition from evolutionary psychology predict the opposite outcome. A retail field study demonstrates that male customers spend more money and purchase more expensive products than their female counterparts in the presence (vs. absence) of a physically dominant male employee. This effect has a more powerful impact on male customers who lack bodily markers of dominance (shorter stature or measures linked to lower levels of testosterone). When confronted with other physically dominant (vs. nondominant) men, these male customers are particularly prone to signal status through price or logo size. Their elevated feelings of intrasexual (male-to-male) competitiveness drive them to spend more money on status-signaling, but not functional, products and to prefer and draw larger brand logos. Because pictorial exposure is sufficient for the effect to occur, these findings are not limited to in-store interactions with dominant male employees but have broad implications for marketing and advertising.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e7ea95a3ef9db7b742e88d7095add4a1c325d28
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In Clinical Psychology
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Marketing
Citations in the corpus
- Examining the effects of robots' physical appearance, warmth, and competence in frontline services: The Humanness‐Value‐Loyalty model (2021, background): “Employees' appearance consequently favors customers' responses involving expenditures such as tipping or purchasing more expensive products (Jacob & Guéguen, 2014; Otterbring et al., 2018).”