Discussion of Consumers’ Body Satisfaction: Focused on Purchasing Decision and Service Satisfaction

Clothing choice has been a way for consumers to express their individuality and the possibility to boost their self-esteem. Despite the amount of prior research conducted regarding body satisfaction and individuals clothing choices, little is known about consumers’ body satisfaction and its impact on their clothing purchasing decisions. Thus, this study tries to shed light on the relationship between consumers’ body satisfaction and its impact on their purchasing intentions. The objective of this study is to identify whether consumers’ body satisfaction would influence their service satisfaction at retail stores when service failure of wrong size clothing recommendations has occurred. Additionally, in this study, gender differences in body satisfaction and purchasing intention is tested. The research identifies that body satisfaction to service satisfaction and service satisfaction to purchasing intention have a direct relationship with each other. Body satisfaction and purchasing intention do not have a direct relationship with each other. Notably, this study also finds that body satisfaction is higher in males but presented no gender difference in purchasing intention after the service failure.


Introduction
Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), a clothing retailer from Europe, expanded into the United States market back in 2001. H&M clothing size differs from American sizing because it follows European sizing charts, which forces American consumers to purchase sizes that differ from what they are accustomed to. Typically, an American consumer would have to size up to wear H&M clothing. Different sizing disgruntled consumers because European sizing made them feel as if they were larger than they actually were. Agitated consumers' complaints led to the sizing corrections of H and M to make female clothes sizes bigger (2018).
Clothing size is pivotal in the garment industry and has a significant influence on consumers' self-esteem and behavior. Busman et al. (2018), investigated clothing size manipulation and the effect on the consumer's selfesteem and purchasing decision. Size manipulation is when an article of clothing is manipulated into being sizes smaller than what it truly is. For example, a consumer who is a really a size medium will fit into a size small. The findings of this research concluded that self-esteem has a positive and direct effect on individuals purchasing decisions on clothing. There is a correlation of thinness being associated with attractiveness in multiple cultures, especially in the Western hemisphere (Rudd and Lennon, 2000).
Clothing choice has always been an outlet to express individuality and possibly boost one's self-esteem. Trautmann et al. (2007), found individuals wear clothing that to camouflage any flaws they believe they need to conceal. For example, an individual might think of a flaw they have and wear a shirt that covers the area, their mood will be significantly better than when they wear a shirt that does not do the same job. Christel and Dunn (2016), discovered that women were sensitive to shopping for clothing that flatters their body type. It also expressed the difficulty of sizing and how it can grow to be confusing because of so many different sizing classifications and how it all differs by the exact retail store in question. It can be extremely difficult because body types differ drastically, especially in the Western world.
Also, gender differences were observed in consumers' body satisfaction and clothing choices. Because the same beauty standards and norms will not apply to both females and their counterparts in the same mean (Frith and Gleeson, 2004). It was also found that women have an obsession with upholding certain standards of themselves and want the world to see them in a specific way (Longoria, 2008;Lowery et al., 2005). Due to this obsession, they desire to hide parts of themselves they do not like and show off the parts they do. Despite the amount of prior research conducted regarding body satisfaction and individuals clothing choices, little is known about consumers' body satisfaction and its impact on their clothing purchasing decisions. Thus, this study tries to shed light on the relationship between consumers' body satisfaction and its impact on their purchasing intentions.
The objective of this study is to identify whether consumers' body satisfaction would influence their service satisfaction at retail stores when service failure of wrong size clothing recommendations has occurred. Next, the comprehension if a possible relationship between body satisfaction and purchase intention is looked at. Another key factor is identifying a relationship between service satisfaction and purchase intention. This then leads to an investigation of there being any correlations between the gender of participants and their body satisfaction involved. Lastly, the data found will be used as an aid for marketing practitioners in providing information on how to interact with consumers. Throughout the research, many different levels of body satisfaction and its impact on consumers' general service perception and purchase intention are looked at as well.
The following research is constructed as follows. The first part provides information from various pieces of literature that investigate body satisfaction and its impact on consumers' behavior. Proposed hypotheses and research questions based on the aforementioned literature is then created. The type of research methodology and the survey sample is then described. Lastly, the research findings are then shared and discuss the implications of the study and future research.

Literature Review
Consumers' body satisfaction has been the focus of the retail industry and there have been various studies regarding the topic in the marketing field. Especially consumers' body satisfaction and clothing are closely studied topic due to it being a way to conceal flaws to create better body satisfaction to meet the expectations of society (Trautmann et al., 2007).
There is a constant need to have the "perfect body" and it is always shown in media such as magazines and television. Particularly in western culture, the beauty standard is fixated on thinness equated with attractiveness and that being the social norm. Rudd and Lennon (2000), discovered the obsession with being thin is even linked to success. Evans (2003), study concluded that women felt negatively towards themselves when comparing themselves to thinner women that appeared on television. As women are expected to meet these unrealistic standards of beauty in the media, it may cause them to develop body-dissatisfaction (Silverstein et al., 1986). Trautmann et al. (2007), discovered clothing is used as a tool to hide problem areas through surveying two universities in the United States. If a woman noticed anybody's flaws, she would most likely try to camouflage her insecurities with clothing. For instance, if a woman believes that her stomach is not toned, she will purchase a loose blouse or shirt that doesn't highlight her stomach. Toth (2014), discovered that consumers' body satisfaction can influence their decision on purchasing luxury items. That is, having a more expensive and name brand item will generate higher body satisfaction. This concept can be correlated to how one views their own body. Furnham et al. (2002), found that women typically want to achieve the measurements of having slim hips, bottom, and thighs compared to men. His study covers ten years of data, but the fact that women want to be thin and physically attractive remained the same. Swami et al. (2010), conducted the International Body Project that expanded to 7,434 individuals across ten countries. Participants were asked about bodyweight ideas and dissatisfaction after being exposed to Western culture. Body dissatisfaction was common in various countries and shows that it is an issue for many women.
The male counterpart has similar goals for the body but will showcase different areas of their body compared to women. Frith and Gleeson (2004), focused on how men care for their bodies and discovered that fears between men and women are contrasting. Males do not want to be seen as meek and have a desire to be bulkier but with muscle, not fat and when going to the gym they focus on their arms, legs, and abs. Being too skinny is associated with being unfit and unattractive because clothing will not fit the way it is alleged to. Males will purchase a t-shirt that shows off their biceps and upper body. Clothing size manipulation is a common practice in the retail business. Size manipulation, also known as vanity sizing, is the reduction of numbers on clothing labels. Busman et al. (2018) found that women feel better when believing they are thinner because they go a size down in clothing and it has a direct and positive effect on their body satisfaction.

Hypotheses and Research Questions
Past studies argued that retail service failure could lead to an unpleasant consumer experience in retail stores and eventually customer switching behavior. Schneider and Bowen (1999), argued if a customer's self-esteem is violated by salesperson uncaring or rude or not interested in assisting the customer, this could lead to the customers' terrible and unpleasant shopping experience. Multiple studies discovered similar findings that how the employee responded to customer needs and requests is a major factor in satisfactory consumer experience (Bitner et al., 1990;Kelley et al., 1993). Consumers who are treated poorly more likely remember the bad experience, and blame the retailer and change their retail patronage behavior (Arnold et al., 2005). Keaveney (1995), also supported that service failure and employee's response to service failure as major reasons why consumers switch their service to other firms.
Prior studies have attempted to understand why some people might be more forgiving than others when service failures are occurring (Joireman et al., 2016;Tsarenko and Tojib, 2011). Consumers who perceived service failure more severely showed lesser forgiveness on the same service failure (Tsarenko and Tojib, 2012). People's personalities, especially self-esteem was proved to be positively related to their forgiveness showing why people react differently in the case of unpleasant events (Eaton et al., 2006). Low self-esteem people tend to read too much into issues and see signs of rejection where none exists (Murray et al., 2002).
Research also has shown that a person's self-esteem is affected by their body satisfaction (Abell and Richards, 1996;Furnham et al., 2002;Paxton et al., 2006). Based on the above discussion, it is reasonable to expect that positive body satisfaction would influence individuals' self-esteem and their willingness to disregard small service failure in a retail setting. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed that consumers' body satisfaction would influence their perception of service satisfaction: H1. Consumers' perceived body satisfaction is positively related to consumers' perceived service satisfaction when presented with the wrong size by a sales associate in a retail store.
Research shows that consumers' body satisfaction is strongly associated with consumers' purchase intention in apparel shopping in an online setting (Merle et al., 2012;Rosa et al., 2006) and in-store (Eckman et al., 1990). Merle et al. (2012), claimed that consumers' body esteem has a positive relation to purchasing decisions. When consumers use a virtual try-on in an apparel website, the body esteem positively influences consumers' confidence in apparel fit, then the confidence positively impacts utilitarian value and eventually affects purchase intention. Rosa et al. (2006), revealed that people with positive body esteem are more interested in apparel and suggested consumers with high body esteem would have higher intentions to purchase because they enjoy activities that involve the body.
Similar findings were also noted from Shim et al. (1991)'s study that people who are satisfied with their bodies were most prone to buy clothes at stores and enjoy shopping.
It is reasonable to expect that strong body satisfaction would influence consumers' purchasing intention, proposing hypothesis 2 as follows: H2. Consumers' perceived body satisfaction is positively related to the consumers' purchasing intention when presented with the wrong size by a sales associate in a retail store.
Various studies have laid claim that consumers' service satisfaction is related to their intentions to purchase intention. The highest level of consumers' purchase intention appeared when consumers' satisfaction is high in communication, travel and recreation industries (Taylor and Baker, 1994). Consistent with this argument (Lai, 2004) also claimed that consumers' service satisfaction positively impacts their continuance intention to use the short message service (SMS). Therefore, hypothesis 3 is suggested as follows: H3. Consumers' perceived service satisfaction is positively related to consumer's purchasing intentions. Furnham et al. (2002), found that young adolescents have different ideas of what an "ideal" body should look like. Out of the 250 students surveyed, the consensus of males wanted large biceps, chest, and shoulders in v-shape. On the other hand, females focused on slim hips, bottom, and thighs. McArthur et al. (2005), discovered similar findings that females desire to be thinner than males in countries such as Argentina, Guatemala, Cuba, Peru, and Chile. Additionally, Khor et al. (2009) found that more females desire for a smaller size body. This leads to the research question of: RQ1. Is there a gender difference in body satisfaction?
Male consumers are known to be influenced by utilitarian motivations when it comes to shopping while female consumers are more driven by hedonic shopping value (Chang et al., 2004). Huang and Yang (2010), reported similar findings that male adolescents show a more positive attitude toward utilitarian motivations such as convenience and cost-saving when it comes to online shopping. Given that male shoppers are more oriented in utilitarian motivations, this research asks the following research question: RQ2. Is there a gender difference in purchasing intention when there is service failure?

Methodology
For this study, participants were given this scenario of being presented with the wrong size clothing by a sales associate at a retail store. The respondents were asked to imagine that a sales associate recommended the wrong size clothing to try on. They were then asked to answer self-administered online survey questions. The study sample consisted of a total of 256 undergraduate students. The respondents were 174 females (67.9%) and 81 males (31.6%).
All the items for this study were adopted from prior research and measured on a seven-point Likert scale of "1" as "strongly disagree" to "7" as "strongly agree." Three items to measure service satisfaction come from Chan et al. (2009). These are: "As a whole, I am not satisfied with the clothing store", "I am unhappy about my overall experience with the clothing store", and "I am satisfied with the overall quality of the clothing store".
Four items involving body satisfaction were derived from Cash (1994). The items are "Most people would consider me good-looking", "I like the way I look without my clothes on", "I like the way my clothes fit me", and "I like my looks just the way they are".

Results
A reliability test was conducted to gauge internal consistency. All of the items' Cronbach's alpha in this research is higher than 0.7, which means these items are reliable (Preston and Colman, 2000). Each of the items' Cronbach's alpha results is shown in Table 1. This research tested the hypothesis using regression analysis to examine the effect of body satisfaction on consumers' service satisfaction and purchase intention in the event of service failure using SPSS statistical software. Hypothesis 1 assumed that people with low (high) body satisfaction would show lower (higher) service satisfaction when presented with the wrong size by a sales associate in a retail store. The result (Table 2) shows that consumers' body satisfaction positively related to their perceived service satisfaction in the case of service failure. That is, consumers with high body satisfaction could have brushed off small mistakes of sales associates in a store while consumers with low body satisfaction could have shown dissatisfaction with the sales staff's wrong size recommendation. Thus, H1 is supported.
Hypothesis 2 assumed that people with higher body satisfaction would show higher purchasing intentions even if they experienced service failure. The results from Table 2 shows that the consumers' body satisfaction is not related to their purchasing intention. Regardless, of how they felt individually about their body and whether they had the "ideal" body type was insignificant to whether they purchased the item or not. Other factors such as pricing comes into play. Thus, H2 is unsupported.
Hypothesis 3 assumed that service satisfaction is positively directly related to consumers' purchasing intentions. The results from Table 2 show that service satisfaction is related to purchasing intention. How an individual is treated by the associates working in the store directly affects whether or not they purchase the item in question. Thus, H3 is supported. This research wanted to find answers to whether there are gender differences in body satisfaction and purchase intention in the event of service failure at retail stores in research questions 1 and 2. The research questions are tested using the T-test to see the differences between male and female groups.
The results in Table 3 demonstrate that male consumers show (M=4.17) higher body satisfaction than female consumers (M=3.78) when they were asked to assess their own bodies. Meanwhile, consumers' purchase intention when there is a service failure did not show any gender differences. Although male consumers are more satisfied with their own bodies, it did not make them want to purchase more than female consumers.

Discussion
This research tried to see whether consumers' body satisfaction influences their perceived satisfaction in service and purchase intention when there is a service failure at the retail store.
First, as we expected in Hypothesis 1, this study found that the consumers' perceived body satisfaction is positively related to consumers' perceived service satisfaction. This is consistent with prior research that perceived body satisfaction is positively correlated to personal happiness and self-esteem amongst all age groups of women (Stokes and Frederick-Recascino, 2003), American women (Swami et al., 2015), pregnant women in Thailand (Jayasvasti and Kanchanatawan, 2005), and preadolescent children (Wood et al., 1996).
Secondly, this study found that body satisfaction does not have a positive significant influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. This finding is noteworthy considering previous research suggests that body satisfaction positively influences purchase intention (Merle et al., 2012;Shim et al., 1991).
It is possible, however, that high body satisfaction could lead directly to less overall concern with clothes. This means that if consumers with high body satisfaction believe themselves to look good in anything, it may not lead to a higher intention to purchase clothes (Rosa et al., 2006). Harrison et al. (2001), discovered that consumers with low body satisfaction have a higher purchase intention to buy the exercise equipment to improve their body image than people with high body satisfaction.
Besides, Pope and Voges (2000) learned when female consumers' intention to use a virtual try-on model of clothes was not influenced by their body satisfaction.
Thus, one plausible explanation is that consumers with high body satisfaction do not have a strong urge to purchase clothes because they do not need to disguise their imperfections with clothes.
Next, this study found that consumers' service satisfaction is significantly related to consumers' purchasing intentions as we expected in Hypothesis 3. Prior studies also supported the same notion when consumers' service satisfaction is higher; their intention to purchase products is also higher (Lai, 2004;Taylor and Baker, 1994). Consistent with previous studies, this study also discovered that female consumers show lower body satisfaction than male counterparts. This result is prevalent in various groups such as preadolescent children (Wood et al., 1996) and young adolescents (Furnham et al., 2002).
Finally, this study found that there is no gender difference in terms of purchasing intention when service failure is involved. It is interesting to note that gender difference was not observed in this study contrary to prior research findings (Akhter, 2003;Bae and Lee, 2011;Lee, 2009). This result, to some extent, supports the finding by Pascual-Miguel et al. (2015) that there is no significant difference in purchase intention in non-digital goods between males and females. This can be interpreted that certain items might have gender differences while other items do not have.
This result could also be affected by the fact that the purchase intention was measured in the case of service failure, not in a regular setting. Since this study asked respondents to imagine there was service failure to offer the wrong size of clothing, participants' intention to purchase might have been affected by this setting.

Conclusion
This study explored the relationships of body satisfaction, purchasing intention and service satisfaction when a service failure occurs. Previous to our study there had been an absence of research involving all three factors in regards to a service failure in a retail setting. Our study discovered that body satisfaction is positively related to service satisfaction. Secondly, consumers' body satisfaction is not related to their purchasing intention. Lastly, it was gathered that service satisfaction is positively related to consumers' purchasing intentions. Also, research questions regarding if there was a gender difference in body satisfaction and whether there was a gender difference in purchasing intention after a service failure, the study identified male consumers show higher body satisfaction than female consumers. However, purchasing intention in the case of a service failure did not show any gender differences.
From these findings, this research provides important managerial implications for marketing practitioners, particularly in the retail industry. As aforementioned, there is a significant relationship between service satisfaction and purchasing intention. Consumers who are satisfied with service would more likely purchase products than people who are not satisfied with service in retail stores. Consumers' service dissatisfaction is strongly associated with sales associates or employees at retail stores. If sales associates show a lack of interpersonal engagement, time commitment, problem resolution and skills, consumers perceive negative service experience and express service dissatisfaction (Arnold et al., 2005;Bitner et al., 1990;Kelley et al., 1993).
Thus, retailers need to train sales associates to better serve consumers and provide higher service satisfaction. Sales associates need to assist the consumers, remain friendly, give consumers distance and not push them but also take time to help them and have knowledge of the business and service or product they are selling (Arnold et al., 2005).
The study has the following limitations. First, the study's sample consisted of all university student participants. Although university students take a big part in consumers, it is difficult to generalize the result when consumers' age range is wide. A larger sample with a wider age range could have provided a better understanding of what consumers in different phases of life consider service satisfaction and their body satisfaction.
Also, this result explains consumers' in the United States. Different countries' cultures may have generated different results in terms of consumers' body satisfaction and their purchase intention in the event of service failure. Thus, future research may include consumers in different cultures to see if there are any cultural differences.
A future study could also consider seeing the differences in service satisfaction and purchase intention between online and physical stores in the event of service failures. As online shopping overtakes a major part of retail, comparing consumers' service satisfaction and purchase intention in online shopping setting could provide meaningful information for practitioners. In the end, a study of frequent shopper and non-frequent shoppers might help marketers and retailers understand if there might be a difference in service satisfaction in consumers who shop more than others. This will then affect their purchasing intention in the event of service dissatisfaction.