Good Sex Appeal, Bad Sex Appeal

This blog tends to focus on matters of sales and marketing, so I thought I'd take a moment to discuss the Comic Con image I addressed in my last post from a marketing standpoint.

Not just smart. She's beautiful too!

After reading my open letter, my wife asked me, "If Comic Con's core market tends to be men, why would the want to market to men? Wouldn't they want to market to get more women?"

Excellent question. That's why I married such a smart woman.

There is a phenomenon is marketing, especially for events which I refer to as the Ladies' Night Effect. Women in general do not want to go to an event where there will be very few other women. They tend to feel uncomfortable and even unsafe. Men, also, all things being equal, prefer to be places where there are women. Thus, bars and nightclubs across the country advertise Ladies' Nights. Free drinks, reduced entry price, and other enticements to women encourage women to attend. More importantly, it signals to women that other women will be there. Likewise, it signals to men that many women will be there. It is effective marketing to both genders although it only targets one.

In a recent article on Medium.com entitled A Gentleman's Guide to Rape Culture, Zaron Burnett discusses the fact that most women in America are frequently concerned about their safety. Whatever your opinion on the actual statistics and prevalence of attacks is, the fact is that most women take safety into account when making plans. If you are an event planner, this means that a large portion of your audience is considering how safe they will be at your event when deciding if they want to attend or not.

I'm going to repeat that for anyone who plans and promotes events, especially men who do so: A large portion of your audience is considering how safe they will be at your event when deciding if they want to attend or not. So, looking at your marketing, does it lead them to feel more safe or less safe? And, if the latter, how much money are you losing because women are staying home because they perceive your event as unsafe?

This is not about feminism, morality, or equal rights (important as those issues are). This is about the fact that these factors have concrete, real world impacts on an event's bottom line.

This image was used on the WCCC 106.9
Facebook Page to promote Comic Con

There is a way to use images of women to attract other women to an event and a way to use similar images to repel them. Consider the image that I discussed in my last post. The women do not look like regular women, and the caption implies that their breasts are the only interesting traits they have (Twelve reasons, six women, in case you didn't get the inference). This marketing could be effective to bring some men to the event, but the men it would bring would be men who are inclined to be receptive to this advertising, a population with a higher than average tendency to objectify women.

To a woman, especially a woman who likes to cosplay at conventions, this signals that this is an event where they might be more likely to find themselves objectified and even possibly harassed. Whether it is true or not, the perception is there. This kind of promotion will attract, more or less, zero women, but consider how the women that Mr. Burnett refers to in his article would see this piece.

You might object that no one is going to look at a single advertising piece and say, "that image tells me that this event is disrespectful to women so I will not attend." You may be correct. However, businesses, especially events, live and die on the margin. A massive portion of potential attendees to an event decide in the last few days or even hours leading up to an event if they will attend. They are on the fence up to the last minute. A rain storm, light cold, or interesting show on TV could dissuade them. With those people, it takes very little to move them from the "maybe yes" side to the "maybe no" side.

Image for Jeff Mach Event's
Build a Better Ball Pit GoFundMe

Conversely, consider the promotion Jeff Mach Event's GoFundMe to build a bigger ballpit, and tangentially to promote their events. The image also uses an attractive woman, but does not objectify. If a man sees this image go by on their Facebook feed, they are more likely to click on it than if, say, it was me in the ball pit, attractive as I am. However the use of the image is not demeaning to the subject. Unlike the image above, she is portrayed as a person who happens to be female as opposed to a set of breasts that happen to be attached to a person.

Over 50% of the population of America are women, and they control a disproportionate amount of the public's spending power. To insult them, demean them, and objectify them for marketing purposes is not merely morally wrong, it is strategically wrong.