Write By Example Of This Abercrombie & Fitch Exclusivity Case Study Case Study

A&F has been heavily criticized by the public for the exclusionary policies applied to the market segmentation and employee relations. As the result, the company’s reputation was damaged and sales were down by 10% in 2013.
The exclusionary marketing tactics have been applied by A&F since 1992 when Michael Jeffries became CEO of the company. Under his management, A&F established a segmented target market with the target audience of young and good-looking customers who would like to pay a lot of money for higher quality clothes. At the same time, the company is not interested in selling clothes to the plus-sized women, which many people and media find absolutely unfair. Moreover, the A&F employees are required to maintain some standards and look good like the target customers. Now A&F has a dilemma – to stick with the segmented target market despite the public criticism or to extend the target market that could have a negative impact on the company’s base of the loyal customers and the production costs, because the more fabric would be needed to manufacture the clothes of large sizes.
The alternative to add a fuller range of sizes has a number of advantages: improved reputation, more variety, refusal from gender stereotyping, increase of the company’s market share in the new segments that have been ignored and catching up with the rival companies such as American Eagle and Aeropostale that offer sizes XL and XXL.
So the company should weight all pros and cons and rethink its marketing strategy that was shaped in 1992, but lost its relevance nowadays. The company should focus on extending the size range, so that more people could buy the A&F clothes. At the same time, as Michael Jeffries stated, the company should not target everyone and become “vanilla”. Therefore, marketing and promotion should remain bright and creative and be targeted at the young customers who would like to fashionable clothes. The company should show that it keeps up with the times and the perceptions popular in the society.