Reflections on the Importance of the Empirical Thesis
How can the female shopping experience be improved? Linn Gustafsson took the question pretty seriously and devoted her thesis as a student of Bocconi MSc in Marketing Management to providing an answer. In The Body Image Reflection. How a Skinny Mirror Influences Women's Fitting Room Experience the Swedish student tested with a field experiment the idea that mirrors that make bodies look slimmer influence female consumers shopping behaviour. She was rewarded with a 110/110 cum laude, and a lot of press. Elle, Glamour, Marie Claire, Business Insider, ABC and other media outlets in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Sweden talked about her field experiment.
"The international exposure was stunning", says Linn's tutor Stefania Borghini. "One thing is to get some press in the U.S. with an academic research, another thing is to get it with a thesis. Field experiments like Linn's aren't common given companies' refusal to collaborate and expose themselves. They find it hard to submit their work to an unbiased scientific analysis". This notwithstanding, 99% of the theses in Marketing Management entail empirical research where students apply theories and quantitative methods. "They must come out with results that companies can readily use". Gustafsson's study, for instance, showed that a skinny mirror has an immediate positive influence on women's body image perception and it increases sales by about 20%.
Being the first study on skinny mirrors in the world, The Body Image Reflection is valuable for both the apparel industry and the academic context. And it raises a moral question: are "magic mirrors" a way to manipulate consumers? "I think moral questions are fundamental when it comes to marketing", Linn Gustafsson says. "At the end of the day marketing is about convincing consumers that your product is the right one for them. To me it is highly important that this 'convincing' is honest and clear. Moral questions in relation to the environment, consumers' privacy, equality are examples of areas that were discussed during my time at Bocconi".
Gustafsson, who graduated from a Double Degree Master program at Bocconi and Copenhagen Business School and is now working at Procter & Gamble as an Assistant Brand Manager, enjoyed "the enthusiasm of the professors and the broad variety of courses available at Bocconi. Most enriching was studying marketing and advertising from perspectives such as fashion, arts, aesthetics, culture. This was new to me and broadened my marketing mindset".