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No, it's not (just) because horny old rich men like watching it.
Images of beautiful women dominate social media because it works in marketing. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
It's not at all about what you prefer watching. Preferably you'd want to avoid watching marketing all together. No, it's about what makes you buy stuff.
Most marketing is directed at women (even for men products) because the purchase decisions are mostly done by women in the moment of sales. Using beautiful women in marketing simply sells better.
Now you're mixing up "what marketers think works" with the much broader category of "images on social media".
What marketing departments dominated by men think works is not the same thing as what actually works is not the same thing as what gets put on social media.
In this case, isn't it because the market evolved faster than they could keep up with? Probably there was a time where most of their customers were "macho men", so these adds would work in marketing.
That is the assumption. But that does not mean it is true.
I posted an example of the tyre company before. The other example I can't find is the blog by a guy who rented two stalls at either end of the same conference, staffed one with models and the other with local grandmothers. The grandmothers did much more business. It's the salesmen who want the stall staffed with models, not the customers.
The evidence-base of sales & marketing is dismal to non-existent.
Could you link the evidence-base of this though?
Could you read the post though?
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?