Sleaze or Success?

I'm typing this on my laptop back home with my folks. I'm down visiting them one last time before the beginning of 4th year, and it fit in nicely with the mother of my brother's girlfriend visiting from Finnland. We zoomed off for lunch at a big shed of echoes called Loch Leven's Larder. 50 conversations reflected off of the metal roof to create an endless hiss of background noise which rained havoc on everybody's ability to hear. Other than that weird feature it was a nice place. Belly of Lamb isn't something I'd have again though. It tasted pretty...floppy, and the name gave me a vivid picture of a belly-less pig looking dead unhappy.

EDIT: A comment pointed out that a pig probably wouldn't be all that bothered about a lamb losing its belly. I meant Belly of Pork :P

I was sitting facing the shop-counter, so saw most of the staff moving around doing whatever they needed to be doing. In the entire shop I saw one male member of staff. The other 30 were young, pretty, girls.

And I mean pretty. They weren't all astoundingly beautiful, but they all had this very direct attractiveness about them. They were the sort of girls that might dissolve the vocabularies of young men, who would be smiled upon approvingly by mothers and grandmothers, and envied in a polite way by other girls of their age. All of them. It was very clearly by design.

The whole thing reminded me of my time working at HomeBase years ago. The way the staff were arranged there was a direct split between 'stock' guys in the back, and 'shop' girls in the front. There was a story going around that a manager of one of the stores had had a TV interview on a show about that very topic. When asked by the interviewer why his store had so many pretty girls on his staff he replied, "They cost the same as ugly ones." and caused quite a damn stir. It remained the same, though, that there were no girls doing stock  and only a couple of guys on the counters.

There are few retail operations which use any demographic other than pretty women. Watch any DFS (or any other furniture) advert, and tell me if you ever see a 'sitting down on couch and looking happy' scene without a pretty woman in it. Toothpaste adverts, shaving adverts (shave with 100 blades and get even more sex!) It all comes down to what consumers associate with success and happiness in having bought the product. This tactic seems ridiculously, ridiculously naive; but as it hasn't gone away in decades it must actually work. According to the salesman: Men want to buy things to impress attractive women; women want to buy things to help them look like those attractive women.

This is a perfect example of a gripe I have about a lot of psychological assumptions. We know what advertisers are trying to do. It's very difficult to give a true impression of a product through a commercial, so they associate an image with it and try and sell that instead. "Real women are sexy. You're a real woman. Buy Dove stuff to show off your pride." In theory this all makes sense, we like thinking better about ourselves and believeing we're unique from the crowd in our style, but because we know this is what they're trying to do, it affects us differently. If we are aware of the motivation behind psychology experiments they fail to work correctly as we either try to please the experimenter or work in opposition. That's why we use single blinds, where we keep the true purpose silent until after the results have come in and debrief the participant after.

So does the "You went her, she wants to be her" approach really work? I'm not convinced about advertisements on television, but in real life if lots of attractive people are doing something, by definition that thing is now cool. If lots of ugly guys were staffing that kitchen, would so many people attend? If Nintendo hadn't put such an effort into showing pretty women playing the Wii, would so many girls feel comfortable playing it?

I really don't think so. I reckon people appreciate honesty in presentation more than physical attractiveness. A restaurant filled with pretty women will still be shunned if they were all crap at their job. The Wii would be ignored if it wasn't sincerely fun. I buy Aussie Shampoo because they openly mock themselvesfor suggesting it works best with their conditioner ("But we would say that, wouldn't we?") A HomeBase shop filled with fat guys would be just as popular if those guys were as friendly and polite as the girls at the counter were.

Theeeeen again. There's a reason women's magazines are filled with hot women styling all the stuff. I'm not sure what my conclusion is here. I guess there are times when it makes sense, and other times when it's just a stupid assumption.