Mr. Viddy Explains: Plain Jane Marketing

I was clicking around the blogosphere earlier today and came across this posting from a young gentleman who had a question regarding the motivation behind using seemingly unattractive people to market a product. You can read the original posting here---> "What Was Motorola Thinking" at Michael Sean Blogs, which has some good postings I must say. Now, on to the explanation as Mr. Viddy sees it. Everybody in the marketing world understands that sex sells. They also realize that most people are drawn towards a piece of marketing that includes an attractive guy or girl in it. We ourselves know that we'd much rather look upon an attractive face or body as opposed to an average or ugly one. The reality is this, most of us our just average in our appearance. That is why using models to sell is so successful, it appeals to the secret desire in most of us to want to be beautiful. We associate the beauty of the model with the product being sold. When we purchase that product we are transferring that image of the model to ourselves and in essence we associate our image with that of the model. In the Plain Jane method of marketing, it is really just a shallow ploy at being clever. The marketing people say to themselves that because it is expected that we use the beautiful people to sell our wares all of the time, wouldn't we be so terribly clever if we ran an ad using someone plain. That way we could say, look at us, we are not as shallow and pretentious as our competitors. They want us to believe that they are being humble and sincere but really it is just another way of drawing attention to the product. That is why you will never see a long running series of ads using regular looking people. We see average every day in the mirror, we need the escapism of beautiful people in the media. It's just human nature.