Faced with a pile of loose, unsold single bananas, retailers can motivate customers to buy overlooked fruit by giving it emotional appeal.
Labelling lone bananas as “sad singles” tugs at shoppers’ heartstrings and increases sales by over half, researchers have suggested.
Academics from the University of Bath compared the effectiveness of “sad singles” signage versus “happy singles” for loose bananas and tomatoes. In comparison, the happy banana signage increased hourly sales of single bananas from 2.02 to 2.13 , making the sad banana signage almost 50% more effective than the happy banana signage.
“The need to belong is one of the most basic human motivations, and applying sadness to single, stray bananas evoke a compassionate response from shoppers.“The study shows it’s an easy, low cost, effective intervention for retailers and policymakers.” The retailer had previously labelled bananas as singles wanting to be bought but had not added the emotional element.
“Food retailers could apply a step-wise intervention approach where they first use anthropomorphism as a sales-boosting strategy before turning to price discounts,” said Dr Eckmann.
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