Note to retailers: If you want me to buy something, make it small. Call it whatever you want: trial size, travel size, sample size. If it's little, it's got a better shot than anything else at jumping into my cart.
What is it about small products that makes me, and many others, stop dead in the aisle to look for a treasure or two? It's not as if I jet off to Europe every couple of weeks, yet I can't resist the baby bottles of Barbasol shaving cream and the plastic packets of Q-Tips.
They're just so . . . cute.
It makes me wonder whether I'm just falling into yet another marketing trap set by manufacturers and retailers, helping to boost their bottom line while adding little intrinsic value to my life.
Yup.
Big sellers
A lot of people love those little tubes of toothpaste, and retailers and manufacturers respond with even more petite products to push. They're profitable, they encourage customers to try new products, and they satisfy a shopper's constant craving to try something new. For cheap.
"Sample sizes are kind of fundamental to our consumer research," said Jeannie Tharrington, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Co., which relies heavily on trial-size versions when it rolls out a new product. "Consumers like to buy sample products because it gives them a chance to try the product. They feel it's a better value to buy the full-size product after they've used it."
Aha! It's a ploy to make me buy more!
OK, so maybe this isn't groundbreaking news, but it certainly suggests there's a lot of consumer-behavior research behind my kid-in-a-candy-store reaction to the trial-size bins. And the retailers are in on it, too.
Trial and travel sizes are getting more and more attention from many supermarket and drugstore chains. Like the consumer-products giants, retailers want shoppers to try new things as often as possible, and sample sizes shake things up. For a retailer trying to boost sales, nothing is quite as deadly as the shopper who comes in week in and week out to buy the exact same items each time.
"Those little travel sizes, they're just huge profit makers," said Dave Harriman, the retired former chief merchandising officer for Giant Food. Harriman says one of the great coups of his tenure at Giant was, years ago, getting racks of small stuff into Giant's stores.
"It's less labor, you don't have to stack it in . . . and people love 'em," he said.
Attention-getters
At Eckerd, the rapidly growing drugstore chain based in Florida, the store's buyers constantly change the selection of trial sizes to keep even weekly shoppers seduced. Sales of each sample product are closely watched; when one begins to drop off, it's quickly replaced. Eckerd has also given trial sizes more space and new fixtures that accommodate 40 to 50 different products at once.
That segment of Eckerd's business is growing in the "double digits," according to Kathy Steirly, vice president of merchandising for Eckerd's beauty business. It's a welcome bit of momentum at the time when Eckerd's sales overall, outside the pharmacy, have been flat.
"It's a category we intend to grow," she said.
And it's hard to talk about the popularity of tiny trial sizes without acknowledging the freebies in hotels, which people invariably take home. Sometimes they give you access to products you'd never buy: At the elegant Lowell Hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, I fell in love with the green-tea shampoo by Bulgari that was so generously provided. I found out just how generous when I went around the corner to the Bulgari store to buy the real thing: $30 for 6.8 ounces. I'm still nursing my two-ounce sample.
Some companies make travel-size health and beauty products for the simple convenience they provide to longtime customers. Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman Rebecca Stazi said the company has responded to consumer demand for portable packages of the company's tried and true brands, like Band-Aids. It even packages some mini baby products together for easy schlepping in diaper bags.
Small treats
The serendipity of finding something new in the trial aisle seems to be helping the whole category at chains like Eckerd, and that could be due in part to the sagging economy. For much of the past year, as consumers scaled back spending on discretionary purchases, they still shelled out for small indulgences such as $10 scented candles or $5 mocha cappuccinos.
"One of the things we know from our market research is that the country is definitely looking for small indulgences," said Ellen Moore of Carton Donofrio Partners of Baltimore, a marketing communications company. Moore's official title (on her business card!) is "customer experience optimizer."
During a time of economic uncertainty, a woman who might normally use inexpensive Suave shampoo may get a little thrill from trying the more expensive Pantene, suggests Moore. "Shampoo or shaving cream doesn't feel like an indulgence, but it is something that is a little special."
I can't say I think about any of this when my hand reaches into the bin for the dwarf deodorant or that sweet little soap. But I guess that's the secret of good marketing -- it's going on either without my knowledge or with my obvious compliance.
