Labels: Can You Tell the Difference?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. In those hours we spend about one third of that time watching just commercials! These commercials basically tell us that what we wear, what our house looks like, and what we own is all wrong. We want to update those looks so we can feel better about ourselves and we have created an image for ourselves based on our material things. Consumer companies continue to change their looks so as soon as they change, we will change with them so we don't have last season's clothes. As a teen, my generation is the #1 target for consumer goods. Teenage girls purchase designer labels, because they feel better about themselves when they wear them. This is because they are generally expensive in most views, and they are made to fit slimmer, more model-like bodies. It's like we are buying an image and the label instead of the quality. Methods/Materials So for my project, I found the top three designer labels at my middle school; Abercrombie, Aeropostale, and Hollister. Then I found the least liked three non-designer labels at my middle school; Target, Sears, and Wal Mart. I went to the websites of each brand name and found 8 items of clothing from the designer labels that were similar to the eight I found at the non-designer name brands. I uploaded the pictures onto an application on my computer called paint where I removed the labels from each of the items in the pairs, and switched them. So after I was finished, it looked like the clothes originally from the designer labels were from one of the non-designer stores, and the non-designer clothing looked like they were from one of the designer stores. I was able to make 100 middle school girls believe the items were from the opposite stores. Then for the placebo, I switched them back and used the original brand names and I asked them which clothing item they liked better. I wanted to see if they would change their clothing decision based on the impact of the designer labels. Results In the end, 83 out of 100 of the middle school girls I tested changed their clothing decision at least once based on the impact of the designer labels! And out of a possible 800 changes that could have been made based on the designer labels, 233 were made. This means that about 30% of the time, teen girls will change their decision for the clothes they wear based solely on the appearance of the label.

Awards (1)

• Third Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2009 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0303

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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