Appearance Matters (even if we pretend it doesn't)
Three ways to take advantage as a marketing executive
I am traveling with my family over the next few weeks and have reduced my publishing frequency. Rather than four posts per week I am moving to two posts per week (one free and one premium). Last week’s premium post was about how 99% correct AI will often get us in trouble in a way that 70% accurate AI will not. To read it, get your free trial here:
In 2016 Sports Illustrated featured Yumi Nu on the cover of it’s swimsuit issue. The cover received a lot of buzz and was considered controversial because Yumi was the first “plus-sized” model to appear on the cover. This may or may not have hurt sales of the magazine issue (maybe the marginal buyer is less interested in seeing a plus-sized model, but it got a large amount of media attention which almost always helps a brand). As regular readers of this newsletter will be aware, regardless of the immediate effect on sales, the choice was clearly a win for SI as it appealed to the majority of its employees. But today’s newsletter is not about marketing to employees. Take a look at the original photo:
Here she is again on the 2022 issue with better resolution:
And here is the above photo focused just on Yumi’s face:
Regardless of one’s belief about Yumi’s physical appearance, it is hard not to argue that her facial features are very attractive. Sport’s Illustrated was willing to “take a risk” and put a plus-sized model on its cover, but it found a plus-sized model they were comfortable describing at “beautiful” and “stunning”.
There is a lot of data showing that overweight people are discriminated against, and there is now significant activism to try and raise the status of that group, often arguing that their additional weight is not their fault, and so they should not be penalized for it by the market. As far as I am aware there is no similar activism for people who are just ugly (and I would suggest that being ugly is even less fault-worthy than weight).
There have been many studies that have shown the discriminating effect of appearance. Most recently Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution recently shared a paper by Adrian Mehic, showing how academic grades are influenced by appearance and in-person teaching. The findings:
When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades. The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction [ed- qualitative subjects only]. Grades of attractive females declined when teaching was conducted remotely. For males, there was a beauty premium even after the switch to online teaching.
Being good-looking gets you better grades when you are judged qualitatively and have significant in-person professor interaction. The appearance effect for men is not as large, but carries over into remote classes (hypothesis: Attractive men develop more genuine confidence, and that confidence is what gets them the higher grades, rather than their actual facial symmetry. Clearly speculative).
Appearance Implications for Marketing Executives
It is obvious to most people that appearance matters. Humans enjoy being around and associated with beautiful people. The first thing to internalize is that the impact of beauty is not small, and that pretending it does not exist for “equity reasons” does not mean it will go away. Once you accept that the “beauty premium” is a real thing, there are at least two important implications for executives:
Don’t be afraid to use beauty when it matters
I once advised a company in the B2B healthcare space. They had a small marketing team that included a young, very attractive, woman. She had a very effective marketing technique (more of a sales technique as you will see): She would connect with targeted health care executives through LinkedIn. She would not try and sell them. Instead she would say things like “I am just getting started in health care and trying to build my connections. Would love to connect with you to learn more about your business.” The middle aged men she connected with accepted at an astonishingly high rate. She then started a conversation trying to learn about their business. Only when the men asked what she did, did she share anything about her business and how it might be something she could sell to them. Her technique worked because she was young and attractive. There are many scammer out there who use similar techniques with fake personas, but she didn’t need to scam anyone. She just had to be who she was and friendly.
Talking about this type of impact openly is difficult in many organizations. No one wants to admit that a young attractive woman has advantages in connecting with older middle aged men. A company definitely does not want to hire on this basis (at least not with any type of paper trail). But if you are in a situation where you have a number of sales/marketing people like this, you should not be confused when the technique works for some of them and not others — and more “training” is not going to solve the problem,
Take advantage of the selection effect
While sales is a place where appearance matters, there are many jobs and roles where appearance is not going to improve results. But as we saw in the Mehic paper attractive people will generally be judged to be better performers even if they are not. The result is that to advance to any given level of an organization, unattractive people have passed a higher bar than attractive people. It doesn’t mean every ugly person is better at their job that every attractive person, but it does suggest that, on average, ugly people at any given level of an organization will be better than the average attractive person at the same level. Effectively you can get promoted through a combination of skill and attractiveness, so attractive people, on average, need less skill to get promoted.
Also, assuming you are like most humans, you have an intrinsic bias against unattractive people. So you will give attractive employees more benefit of the doubt, and be a little more strict with your ugly direct reports. If you are conscious of those biases you may be able to overcome them. If successful you may be able to use “appearance arbitrage” to have a better performing team of (less attractive) employees.
The idea that bias exists against some groups is very accepted in most corporate cultures today, but I have never seen a list of those groups experiencing bias that includes unattractive people. As long as others are not paying attention, it is an opportunity for those that do.
Keep it simple,
Edward