PRETTY GIRLS

A simple question for the male readers of this audience: How much longer would you pay attention to a loan offer if the offer Ad/brochure included a small picture of an attractive looking woman? All of us will dismiss this as stupidity but as with many attempts to understand our own behavior, we are wrong here too. We as marketers face a constant challenged posed in the guise of making an offer we put out even sweeter or more attractive to our target audience. A 10% discount? Bundling products? Free shipping? But smart marketers know the answer to the aforementioned question. It is to continuously test out all the options in the marketplace.

SOUTH AFRICAN BANKS:

The experiment conducted by a South African Bank will set the premise for you to understand what I’m trying to convey. A South African bank was trying to boost their loan business tried using the psychology angle on their customers. They sent 50,000 mails out to prospective customers via the post but there were several subtle changes and variations in the mail. First, the offers included a range of randomly selected interest rates — presumably, the interest rate (along with repayment terms) is by far the most important criteria for whether a loan offer is appealing. More relevant, possibly to us was the fact that the banks included a few psychological primers in the mails sent out to the prospects — some subtle details in the direct mail which were used to frame the brain of the prospect into a particular decision making state.

The researchers were amazed when they crunched the numbers to find out that their response rates received a boost but what was even more surprising was that the prospects ignored the higher interest rates on the sign up form. There was a wide range of interest rates given as a baseline in the experiment, ranging from 3.25% — 11.75%. There were a lot of different variations in that study including the ad copy, images used, competitor’s rates, male photos enclosed, female photos enclosed, etc. But the one which is most relevant to us and quite interesting is:

For the male customers who were mailed the loan offer, just replacing the photo of a male with a photo of female on the offer letter significantly increased the sign up rates; the effect is about as much as dropping the interest rate 4.5% points. For female customers, we find no statistically significant patterns when they were exposed to both male and female photos enclosed in their mail. Overall, the one takeaway from this experiment would be that the presence of an attractive female: even if it is completely irrelevant, will capture the attention of the male audience than one that does not have such imagery. The effect of a mere photo of an attractive woman enclosed within the envelope of the loan offer was equivalent to nearly a 5% difference in the interest rates of the loan — a huge differential in the lending world.

ARE MEN THAT DUMB?

Two evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of the McMaster University studied this phenomenon and concluded that priming with pictures of attractive women were causing men who participated in their experiments to “discount (sic) the future” (give less regard to) more by putting them in a “mating” frame of mind. A clever experimental plan demonstrated the priming effect of the male brain when exposed to photos of attractive women.

The researchers evaluated the degree to which male subjects discounted the future. We all discount the value of future benefits vs. immediate or short-term benefits. Most of us would choose to have $100 given to us immediately vs. say, $105 in two years. Every individual has their own “discount rate” for making these kinds of decisions. Men, as a group, have a higher discount rate than women, i.e., their preferences skew toward shorter-term rewards. The studies also showed that when men were exposed to these pictures of attractive women, even in situations where normally, it would have made more sense to go with the future reward, chose to go with immediate gratification and to obtain the money in the moment. Wilson and Daly tested this hypothesis by displaying photos of the faces of attractive and unattractive members of the opposite sex to men and women. Men who viewed photos of women who were judged to have attractive faces showed a significant increase in their discount rate, i.e., they became more attracted by short-term rewards. The other groups did not show statistically significant changes.

The neuro marketing implications in the real world remain the same: the male viewers are influenced by photos of attractive women, and their decisions are skewed toward the short-term, immediate and impulsive. Incorporating the same in your marketing materials and point of sale materials could really boost your sales if you were catering to a primarily male audience. The work done by Wilson and Daly specifically looked at monetary rewards, which would have most significance for products like loans, insurance, investments, casinos, etc. It could also be used in several other industries like apparel, perfumes and even in irrelevant contexts (as with the babies) as a tool to drive sales.