Abercrombie & Fitch, a skinny strategy

Time to talk about a positioning strategy which has made a lot of noise in these past days: the one of the famous American brand Abercrombie & Fitch.

Abercrombie & Fitch refuses to produce XL or XXL sizes in women’s clothing. This brand has a specific idea of what beauty means and according to its advertisements, beauty doesn’t match with "large" women. A&F doesn’t want to be related to what they call politely "strong" people. In order to avoid the presence of "strong" consumers in its shops or to see "strong" people wearing A&F clothes in the streets, the brand simply decided to not provide these sizes. Easy like 1, 2, 3!

The CEO of the brand, Mike Jeffries, is not ashamed of this controversial segmentation. These following quotes express clearly his ideas:

"Our business is built around sex appeal. It’s almost everything. That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that."

The fact that this strategy exclude some customers doesn’t bother him.

"In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."

Jeffries said he thinks that including everyone would make his business boring.

"Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either."

If you’ve never been inside a A&F shop, you really have to. In my point of view, the experience is kind of really funny and morally disturbing. I have to admit that at first it’s a pleasure for the eyes, but when you finally think more about the concept, you realize that the employees, skinny and perfect students, are just paid for being beautiful and dancing in the shops. 

So, thanks to Mike Jeffries’ clever ideas, we can add a new segmentation criteria: fat/skinny. Besides the excessive prices of their clothes, these kind of thoughts give me one more good reason to boycott A&F.

I think that the strategy of the last H&M campaign is much more relevant. Breaking with the stereotypes of skinny women, the brand has chosen to present a plus-size campaign, featuring the XXL model Jennie Runk, for their summer swimsuits. 

Léa Vinel