• by Sara Arnell , July 27, 2012

I recently spoke at a Women’s Leadership Exchange event in Chicago. The founder, Andrea March, is small in stature but huge in vision and in her mission to empower successful women. Throughout this event, working women heard from other working women on strategies and first-hand experiences about how to grow their business and career opportunities. A predominant theme was “size.” The burning question: Is small just a size or does it stand for something, well, bigger? And conversely, can something large, such as a competitor, be seen in a smaller, less looming way?

As the women at the WLE event discussed, small needs to be seen as a benefit. Small does not have to mean “less.” Things that are considered small in relation to a standard or norm can be positioned as an opportunity, not merely a size. 

Size is clearly an important marketing topic. It spans every discussion, from market share to budgets to the size of ounces in soft drinks. For working moms, right-sizing is a daily issue to think about. Take multi-pack snacks, for example. The dilemma is, do you buy the 12-pack because it is more cost efficient, and perhaps with a coupon, extremely affordable? Or, do you buy a standard six-pack because you know that less will be consumed in the same amount of time as the larger multipack? Somehow, even if that multipack is put on a high shelf, out of reach of little fingers, it always, somehow, manages to make its way down. It’s just one of those things. 

Right-sizing purchases needs to be considered in terms of the size of the product as well as the size of the pack.  With the popularity of club stores and super-sized, super-affordable selections, one has to wonder if having more to consume and available in the pantry is really the right way to think about size. When it comes to marketing to moms, in terms of product and package sizing, small might be the bigger way to go.

Facing the dichotomy between smaller household budgets that benefit from larger-sized purchases and health and wellness issues that benefit from smaller-sized purchases is something marketers need to reconcile. The trend in reducing content size (fewer pieces or ounces) while keeping the price and often the package size the same is yet another supermarket aisle watch out.

So, working moms who need to right-size budgets, ounces, package size and their time to figure all this out need not have to choose between large or small; between wellness of the household budget and wellness of family consumption.

Marketers need to make “small” as big an opportunity as “large” in terms of cost efficiencies and family happiness. Small is an opportunity for working moms to make more out of less and help their families eat, drink and be merry in package and portion sizes that make for a healthy budget and healthy family.