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Ok I realise that I did not put the previous comment in the friendliest form, sorry about that !
Your point is that the marketing choice of using beautiful women is dictated by the sellers' preferences rather that the buyers' one. In the apparent absence of evidence to support either hypothesis, you are willing to favor the former one.
What I haven't said explicitly yet is that there is one argument that makes me find the latter one more likely in the absence of further evidence : the businesses that make their marketing choices based on customers' preferences will tend to survive more. kn our capitalist society, it makes sense to me.
You gave one counter-example that is not strong enough to change my opinion as it can also be explained with the firm having poorly evaluated what their target audience was. They do say in the article that more women started buying tyres after the marketing change, which is indeed not the audience targeted with the sexy-girl ad.
It does however a good job at disproving the affirmation "because everyone regardless of gender and age are biologically conditioned to look at them." to which you were originally replying, and I disagree with that affirmation as well. I just think your conclusion goes too far i the other direction, in the absence of further evidence.
Like I said, the evidence-base is near non-existent. But you can't look at decisions foisted on us almost exclusively by sales types and assume that means it works because they know what they're doing.
It was a tech conference attended almost exclusively by men.
I wish I could find the article now. But (some of) what he said was that the models attracted sleaze balls who were there to have a jolly, not to do business. Stall busy, order book empty. And that the local grandmothers did so well because they could recommend local restaurants and leisure activities and did not make the company look like it only wanted to do business with sleaze balls. Stall busy, order book full.
He also said that it was the sales men (specifically, men) who demanded they employ models because they wanted to spend all day hanging out with models being sleaze balls, not because there was any evidence that it improved business (hence, the test).
The one example I was commenting about is the tyre example. They sold more tyres to women after dropping the sexy girl on the ad. How much of a stretch is it to assume that these women were not the sexy ad's target audience because women used to be less (socially allowed to get) interested in cars?