It’s extremely difficult for a business to make a positive impact without hurting someone. It’s always been difficult, but especially so when it comes to marketing and advertising. Now the quote from Mr. Cohen was as follows:
“In today’s competitive retail environment, the methods have been changed for capturing the consumer’s awareness of your brand. Being able to find a brand enhancer, or what I call a walking billboard, is critical. It’s really important to create an environment that’s enticing to the community, particularly with the younger, fashionable market. A guy wants to go hang out in a store where he can see good-looking gals.”
Now this says a lot and veers strongly towards an opinion that justifies using good-looking people to prove that an outlet is quality. I actually happen to agree somewhat with this opinion. For one I do believe that we, as a species have a natural tendency to think higher of people we find physically attractive. In fact I’m pretty sure I read about a study done on infants in which the child was shown multiple pictures of women. In the study, the child tended to look at the more ‘attractive’ picture for a longer period of time. There was also a test done on the show “What would you do?” where they had different actors attempt to steal a locked up bike in public. Now the test was designed specifically to point out racism (they used male actors of different races) however I think the study is relative to my point. When they had a pretty female actor steal the bike, some people went out of their way to assist her in the theft! My point is that our generation was raised on physical perfection and beauty. So who are we to blame companies when they try to appeal to that?
“In today’s competitive retail environment, the methods have been changed for capturing the consumer’s awareness of your brand. Being able to find a brand enhancer, or what I call a walking billboard, is critical. It’s really important to create an environment that’s enticing to the community, particularly with the younger, fashionable market. A guy wants to go hang out in a store where he can see good-looking gals.”
Now this says a lot and veers strongly towards an opinion that justifies using good-looking people to prove that an outlet is quality. I actually happen to agree somewhat with this opinion. For one I do believe that we, as a species have a natural tendency to think higher of people we find physically attractive. In fact I’m pretty sure I read about a study done on infants in which the child was shown multiple pictures of women. In the study, the child tended to look at the more ‘attractive’ picture for a longer period of time. There was also a test done on the show “What would you do?” where they had different actors attempt to steal a locked up bike in public. Now the test was designed specifically to point out racism (they used male actors of different races) however I think the study is relative to my point. When they had a pretty female actor steal the bike, some people went out of their way to assist her in the theft! My point is that our generation was raised on physical perfection and beauty. So who are we to blame companies when they try to appeal to that?
This problem isn’t only relative to the clothing industry. In fact it’s in a lot of places once you look at it. For instance it’s very common in the television industry. People don’t want to commit to a character or watch a show unless there’s someone they find pleasing to watch. It sounds bad, but you can’t deny that if you could choose to watch a show about average/below-average looking people or watch a show with very attractive people (like every single television show out presently) you’d probably choose the later. Characters that are ‘funny-looking’ are usually the comic relief. The punch line to jokes. Take for instance, the office. People don’t like Dwight because he’s hot, they like him because he’s funny. People like Jim because he’s hot and funny. I’ve heard people say that they wouldn’t watch the show unless Jim was in it. Another show, on the complete other end of the spectrum, is Mad Men. Mad Men is one of my favorite shows and I openly admit that I enjoy watching it because everyone in it is beautiful. We naturally have a higher opinion of better looking people.
Another industry where physical beauty is an impacting force is in the video game industry. Now I think I’ve talked about this before, relating to the video game ‘Dead Island’. I’m going to bring it back. If you ever EVER get the opportunity to go to a video game convention, go and report back with what you see. Most people will see a combination of attendees who look like ‘typical gamers’ and what the game industry calls ‘booth babes’. A booth babe is the video game industry’s version of a walking billboard. It’s shameful and even guys in the industry are ashamed when they see these girls parading around advertising for games that have nothing to do with how beautiful they are or how big their breasts are. However they keep hiring them. Why? Because it really does sell games. The video game industry is seen as a very male populated industry. I’m sure there is some legitimate statistic out there that says that hiring a booth babe will boost profit. It has an effect in the games themselves too. Characters in games are always beautiful, even it’s not immediately evident. I can’t recall every playing a video game as a character that looked bad to me. It’s just common and i wouldn’t be surprised if that was another thing that boosted profit.
You see, to the clothing industry employees are like actors. Actors spend hours with makeup, trying to look good for an audition. Now they could be the most amazing actor in the century, but if they don’t look the part then they’re not likely to get the job. And that’s how retail managers see things. They do value experience, but they have the right to value appearance as well. Isn’t that why we dress up for interviews? It makes us look all business, which is mostly just a front.
One last thing. If you walked into a store and all of the mannequins weren’t slim and perfect, would you spend a lot of time shopping there? We see clothes on the mannequin and we can visualize ourselves wearing them. Think to ourselves ‘I wish I had that body, maybe those clothes will make me look that slim’. Given that I don’t think any average person has a body type like a mannequin, if they do then lucky them. I think that that’s another reason that they hire beautiful people. Their employees end up being walking mannequins. We see the employees wearing fine clothes (probably from the store they’re working at) and we naturally want to look like that and wear those clothes. It’s the perfect advertising scheme.
If a company wants to sacrifice work quality for beauty then let them. They can do whatever they want, it’s their company. I can see behind their reasoning perfectly. They’re going to keep doing it too, because according to their profits, it’s working. Unless society proves to them that they don’t need models working their to sell a product, nothing is going to change.
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