Geoffrey Miller

Why all deodrant ads commodify women and diamond ads don’t

diamirza-wildstone

Vivek Kaul

This is another column which is different from the usual stuff that I write. Over the last few years I have been observing a few advertisements that tend to commodify women and few which don’t and have been wanting to understand, why things are the way they are. This column is a result of that.
Take the case of deodorant advertisements. These ads are like item numbers in films. They titillate and present women as one dimensional objects of sexual desire.
The only difference is that at the end of the deodorant advertisement the hero usually gets the girl because he has had the foresight to spray the deodorant on his well built body. The woman gets attracted by the smell of the deodorant and is hooked on to the guy.
One such advertisement was that of Wild Stone deodorant which featured the out of work but still stunningly beautiful actress Dia Mirza. As the formula for such advertisements goes, Mirza is seen getting attracted to a well sculpted male model who has applied the Wild Stone deodorant.
In real life it would be foolish to think that beautiful women are attracted to men on the basis of just a brand of a deodorant. But this ad, like most deodorant ads, is not targeted towards women. It is targeted towards men.
As brand guru Martin Lindstrom writes in Brandwashed –Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy: “in general women tend to more easily persuaded by ads that are more romantic than sexual… Men, on the other hand, respond to sexual innuendo and women in bikini.”
In fact when it comes to deodorants a lot of research and thinking has been done to arrive at these clichéd advertisements. As Lindstrom told me in an interview when I asked him what the ultimate male fantasy was: “A man sitting in a hot-top-spa with two naked ladies on each side – popping a bottle of Champagne. Unilever, the manufacturer of AXE discovered this very observation based on thousands of interviews and observations of men worldwide – realising that this very fantasy indeed seems global – and today explaining why AXE uses this very imagination as the foundation for all their ads.”
And that explains to a large extent why all deodorant advertisements are one and the same. Geoffrey Miller, a professor of evolutionary psychology has an explanation for this in his book Spent –Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behaviour. He writes “Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all-important, not only for survival but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children. Many products are products are signals first and material objects later.”
Deodorant ads work on this evolutionary trait and tend to project the smell of a deodorant as a sexual mating signal from the male to the female. This is primarily because biologically the best strategy for a man is to be promiscuous and try and attract as many women as possible. “The more women with which he mates, the greater number of children containing his genes are possible… Thus, a man’s biological criteria can be simple: 1) she must be healthy; 2) she must be young; 3) she must be receptive; 4) and she must be impregnable,” writes Richard F. Taflinger in You and Me, Babe: Sex and Advertising.
While a man may want to be promiscuous it may not be always possible for him to do so because of societal pressures. But even with that a subconscious need may still remain. And that is what marketers who commission sexually loaded ads, play on. A great example is the chocolate man ad of Axe Body Spray, which had multiple women swooning over one man.
The other product that has taken on to sexually loaded advertising is the male ganji. A typical ad shows a guy wearing a ganji (these days chances are that this could be a filmstar) always getting the girl in the end. What is true about ganjis is also true about the male underwear.
An ad that went overboard with sexual innuendo was the Amul Macho underwear ye to bada toing hai. The ad showed a woman, who was probably newly married, going to the village river to wash her husband’s underwear. And in the process the other women around her were shown to get sexually turned on. The ad again played on the promiscuous nature of men even though it did not feature a man and ended up demeaning women through its one dimensional projection.
In fact automobiles are another area which tend to get sexually loaded advertising. This phenomenon is still to take off in India where most car advertising tends to concentrate on the family and if not the family, then the double income no kid couple.
But in the developed countries this mode of advertising has been around for a while. Lindstrom points to a Volvo ad showing a silhouette of a Volvo’s driver’s seat with its parking brake extending in the air – precisely like an erect penis – over the tagline, “We’re just as excited as you are”.
One thing that is common to this track of advertising is that they tend to project women as bimbos. As Madhukar Sabnavis of Ogilvy & Mather puts it “Do Axe commercials project women as bimbos, or are they a light-hearted take on the man-woman relationship? I would prefer to think it’s the latter…The judgement is subjective and qualitative, and so it cannot be cast in stone.” While the advertising industry might say that they are not projecting a stereotype, the evidence is clearly to the contrary.
But what about women? Why don’t they take to direct sexual advertising and tend to be swayed more by romantic advertising?
A few years back Tanishq released an advertisement featuring Adil Hussain and Tisca Chopra which had all the settings of romance—a couple in a restaurant with the candles lit, saxophone playing in the background and a man getting ready to gift a solitaire to his wife of ten years.
So why do these kind of advertisements work well with women? As Taflinger puts it “Women…have a far greater physical, physiological and temporal stake in producing children. This means she must be highly selective in her choice of men if she wishes to produce the highest quality children in her reproductive lifetime. If she selects just any man that comes along, she could waste all that time and energy that pregnancy and rearing require on a possibly weak or nonviable child. She thus aims her biological criteria at getting the best possible man. The sex act, and his participation, being so brief, doesn’t have to be of any particular interest to her. What is important is the quality of genes he brings and the help, if any, she will have while carrying, bearing and rearing the children.”
Now that does not mean that the sexual desires are strong only in men. As Taflinger explains “She also has sexual desires as strong as a man’s. However, she will often subordinate that desire. That is, she may desire a physically attractive man, but she will not actually have sex with him until he has satisfied more than physical criteria.”
Hence, women are more careful than men when it comes to entire ritual of mating. But that does not mean they don’t send out sexual signals. They do that, but not in a way as direct as men. The entire cosmetics business is built on this insight. As Miller puts it: “The whole cosmetics business is focused on helping women appear younger, more fertile, healthier, and thus better able to bear offspring. The evolutionary background of cosmetics is that in most primate species,sexual selection focuses very heavily on facial appearance. In assessing women’s ages, men apparently evolved to pay close attention to facial and bodily cues of being in the young-adult phase of peak fertility. So women could evolve to fake their fertility all the way from around age twelve to around age twelve to around age sixty.”
And how cosmetics help? “One way of faking fertility across a broader age range is to apply cosmetics that amplify facial fertility cues that peak in young adulthood, such as plump lips, large eyes, prominent cheekbones, smooth and radiant complexion, thick and glossy head hair, and minimal facial hair,’ writes Miller.
This explains why you will see more deodorant ads stereotyping women in the time to come. But you will never see a diamond ad doing the same.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Mar 11, 2015

Tyranny of choice: What I learnt while trying to buy a new mobile phone

SmartphoneVivek Kaul  
Recently I dropped my mobile phone into a bucket of water. The phone worked for a while and then stopped working. Given that, I had been using the phone for nearly two years now, I thought its time to buy a new one. And this is where my problems started.
I have managed to stay away from using smart phones till now. For the last five years I have been using a dual SIM model from Samsung. Given a choice, I would have wanted to buy the same phone all over again, like I had done two years back. But sadly Samsung doesn’t make that model any more ( at least I couldn’t find it anywhere on the web).
Thus, started the journey to figure out which mobile phone to buy. Gradually, recommendations started coming in. The people around me took it upon themselves to make sure that I bought the right mobile phone.
But looking at the choice that was available I ended up being all confused. First and foremost one needed to decide on the price range. Then on the company. Then on the right model. And how did one do that?
With every phone having so many features, how does one figure out which one was the better phone? In fact, feature creep is a huge problem with modern day products. As Geoffrey Miller, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico in the United States in his book Spent – Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behaviour “This [i.e. feature creep] is driven partly by the need to make each new product model different from last year’s, but also partly by the consumer’s unconscious desire for a product that is right at the limit of his cognitive ability, and one that therefore functions as a credible cognitive display. The male buying them thinks those features can be talked about in ways that will display my general intelligence to potential mates and friends, who will bow down before my godlike techno-powers.”
The question is what about those people who just want to use a phone like a phone (i.e. make calls, send smses and probably take a picture or two once in a while). How should they go about choosing the right phone? And ultimately human beings have limited cognitive ability. It is simply not possible for them to analyse a product on every dimension and then make a purchasing decision. As Stefan Thomke, an authority in the management of innovation told me in an interview I did for Forbes India “We have been in many meetings where the entire meeting is dedicated to discussing more and more features. There seems to be an assumption that we are basically done when we can no longer squeeze more features into a product. Presumably assuming that the more features a product has, the customer actually sits there and counts the features, and that somehow drives our ability to price it.”
The consumers tend to simplify this problem by trying to look at one or two dimensions, which they think are important. Take the case of computers. Here people rely on the processor speed of the chip to make a purchasing decision. But is it the right criteria on which a purchasing decision should be based.
As Niraj Dawar writes in Tilt – Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers “Like any summary measure of a complex system, speed has its limitations: two computers with the same processor speed on their chips may perform very differently depending on the software loaded on the computer, the transfer speed of inflation to and from memory, its connectivity to the network, and many other variables. But most buyers leave these intricacies to experts and rely instead on the simple summary measure of speed.”
This is how consumer simplify the purchasing decision by looking at an irrelevant criteria. And what true about computers is also true about a lot of other products. As Dawar points out “For example, consumers evaluate digital cameras using the simple summary measures of megapixels, when in fact the megapixel has little to do with the quality of pictures taken by the camera. It is the size of the light sensor rather than the megapixel count that determines picture quality. Similarly, automobile buyers often rely on horsepower as a measure of the muscle of the car, when it is actually torque they are looking for, as torque determines acceleration, which is the sensation that drivers seek. Customers rely on threat count when buying synthetic bed sheets, but threat count is irrelevant in synthetic fabrics—it only provides a measure of quality for natural fibers such as cotton.”
Given these reasons I started looking for an irrelevant criteria using which I could figure out which mobile phone to buy. My search is still on. And as soon as I find one, I will go ahead and buy a new mobile phone. Meanwhile, I did the smart thing. I paid Rs 300 and got my mobile phone repaired. To conclude, let me quote what Thomke of Havard Business School: “We often talk about it as a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. To make things simpler is very hard because that requires you to have a very deep understanding of what the user really wants. And once you have that deep understanding, you have the confidence. Mark Twain once said, if I had more time I would write a short letter.”
The article first appeared on www.firstbiz.com on February 7, 2014 
 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Why Priyanka Chopra was seen posing on the bonnet of a Range Rover

Priyanka Chopra at the Delhi Auto Expo

Vivek Kaul
The most enduring image to have come out of the Auto Expo 2014 until now has been that of the actress Priyanka Chopra posing sexily on top of the Jaguar Land Rover’s Range Rover LWB, during its launch. The actress even tweeted about it and said “Just unveiled the stunning Land Rover LWB…What a beauty she is-sleek & powerful!check it out.”
The picture got several of my friends on Facebook and Twitter talking about this sports utility vehicle (SUV). The question I asked them was why would anyone want to buy a gas guzzling and difficult to park and manoeuvre SUV ( I meant any SUV here and not just the one that Piggy Chops unveiled).
“She is a real beauty,” said one friend. “SUVs show a passion for design and give the feel of power while driving,” said another.
But there is more to why men love SUVs, than just great design and power.
Geoffrey Miller, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico in the United States, writes about this in his book Spent – Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behaviour.
Miller asks “Why would the world’s most intelligent primate buy a Hummer H1 Alpha sport utility vehicle for $139,771? It is not a practical mode of transport. It seats only four, needs fifty one-feet in which to turn around, burns a gallon of gas every ten miles, dawdles from 0 to 60mph in 13.5 seconds and has poor reliability.”
But despite being not so high on performance (or what we Indians like to call kitna deti hai?) and environmentally unfriendly, the male of the human species simply love SUVs. Why is that? “Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all-important, not only for survival but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children. Many products are products are signals first and material objects later,” explains Miller.
This tendency of men to send signals through products is referred to as the “peacock syndrome” in reference to the tendency of peacocks displaying their plumage in an effort to impress the peahens or the female of their species. In fact research carried out by Dr Michael Dunn at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff showed that women rated a man higher if he drove a “fancy motor rather than in an old banger”.
“It appears that the stereotype of women being positively influenced by a man’s status is true and, evolutionarily speaking, this makes sense,” Dunn told www.telegraph.co.uk. In a similar research, researchers at the University of Texas studied this phenomenon and concluded that: “although showy spending is often perceived as wasteful, frivolous and even narcissistic, an evolutionary perspective suggests that blatant displays of resources may serve an important function, namely as a communication strategy designed to gain reproductive rewards.”
Dr Jill Sundie who led this research was very direct when he said “This research suggests that conspicuous products, such as Porsches, can serve the same function for some men that large and brilliant feathers serve for peacocks.”
Evolutionarily, the best strategy for a man is to be promiscuous and attract as many women as he can. As Richard F. Taflinger in You and Me, Babe: Sex and Advertising “The more women with which he mates, the greater number of children containing his genes are possible… Thus, a man’s biological criteria can be simple: 1) she must be healthy; 2) she must be young; 3) she must be receptive; 4) and she must be impregnable.”
For women things work a little differently. Condoms, birth control pills and other birth prevent measures are relatively recent inventions and given this, historically, women could not be promiscuous like a man could be. This was because sex with a man could result in a pregnancy of nine months. Hence, women needed to be choosy.
As Taflinger puts it “Women…have a far greater physical, physiological and temporal stake in producing children. This means she must be highly selective in her choice of men if she wishes to produce the highest quality children in her reproductive lifetime.”
This is something that Dunn of University of Wales in Cardiff agrees with. As he puts it “Females focus on questions of wealth and status because if the male possesses those, that male would be in a better condition to rear healthy offspring.”
And driving an SUV is a clear symbol of that. As Geoffrey Miller writes in The Mating Mind – How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature “The metaphor seems apt because SUVs make such a show of their rugged utility, all-terrain capability, enormous power, and absurd size…Their huge size demonstrates the ability to incur a high initial cost, and their large engine demonstrates the ability to incur high running costs due to poor mileage. Although capable of transporting six adults across a mountain range, they are often used for nothing more demanding than driving one’s toddler to and from day-care, through leafy suburbia…Principally, their size is a wealth-indicator.”
Hence, a man driving an SUV sends out the right kind of signal to women.
Of course, men cannot be as promiscuous as they want to be because they live in a society. And in any society there are societal pressures. But even with this, there is subconscious need among men to be promiscuous. Marketers play on this and use women to advertise all kinds of products.
Most deodorant ads run on just one formula, where women swoon over a man after he has applied the deodorant being advertised. In fact, in India even underwear ads have been targeted at the promiscuous nature of men.
Given this, it is not a surprise that Priyanka “Piggy Chops” Chopra was seen posing sexily on top of a Range Rover at the Auto Expo in Delhi yesterday. The idea was to tell the prospective customers that anyone driving this car would attract women as sexy and beautiful as Priyanka Chopra. Some marketing formulas never fail.
The article originally appeared on www.firstbiz.com on February 6, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Why the UP MLA needs a Rs 20 lakh car


Vivek Kaul
Chote Netaji Akhilesh Yadav is a concerned man these days. A man concerned for more than 400 MLAs of Uttar Pradesh. To help them he decided to increase the area development fund for the MLAs and MLCs of Uttar Pradesh to Rs 1.5 crore from the current Rs 1.25crore. And then he allowed the MLAs to spend Rs 20 lakh from the increased allocation of Rs 25 lakh to buy a car.
The media did not like the move. And went bang bang bang against it, forcing Akhilesh to withdraw the “free car” offer. “I take back the whole decision. The reason behind this is that most of the MLAs have decided not to take the offer after the media hype,” he told reporters after changing his decision.
When making the decision Akhilesh had said that a car will provide MLAs mobility and help them more effectively. Fair point. Once the electorate of this country has elected an individual to represent them, they need to provide him with the basic things that he needs to carry out his job of representing them, properly.
Given this a car is surely a necessity for an MLA. There is no arguing with that. So to that extent Akhilesh was right. But the question that crops up here is that why allocate Rs 20 lakhs to buy a car?
Cars in India can be bought for as low as Rs 2 lakh. I am no auto expert and won’t be able to tell you the difference between torque and horse power, but I do know that a decent comfortable car can easily be bought in this country from anywhere between Rs 5-8 lakh.
So why allocate Rs 20 lakh then?
Before I get around to answering this question, let me deviate a little and tell you about something interesting that I read in a book titled Spent — Sex, Evolution, And Consumer Behaviour written by Geoffrey Miller, a few years back.
In this book Miller points out that “Consumerism has deep roots in evolution.” He then explains it with an example. “Why would the world’s most intelligent primate buy a Hummer H1 Alpha sport utility vehicle for $139,771? It is not a practical mode of transport. It seats only four, needs 51 feet in which to turn around, burns a gallon of gas every ten miles, dawdles from 0 to 60mph in 13.5 seconds and has poor reliability. Yet, some people feel the need to buy it.”
The question is why would anyone want to buy a car which has such poor performance parameters. “Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all-important, not only for survival but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children. Many products are products are signals first and material objects later,” writes Miller.
The last sentence is particularly interesting: “Many products are products are signals first and material objects later.” Just keep this sentence in mind, and let us return to Akhilesh and his Rs 20 lakh car.
Why does an MLA need a car? The answer is very simple and Akhilesh has already explained it to us. An MLA needs a car to go around his constituency. It gives him better mobility. Allows him to meet more people. Travel faster. And spend his limited time in a much better way.
All the above mentioned things can be easily accomplished even by buying a Tata Nano or a Maruti Zen or any car in the range of Rs 5-8 lakh. So why allocate Rs 20 lakh to buy a car?
For an MLA a car is much more than mobility. It is a signal of “power”. It is a signal of the fact that he is an “important” person. These are things that are very important for an MLA to project to the constituency of voters. If he is visiting a particular area of his constituency there has to be a buzz “ke MLA sahab aa rahe hain”. And all these needs or “signals” as Miller calls them, cannot be accomplished by driving around in a Tata Nano with a ‘red-light” on top.
What an MLA needs is an SUV (sports utility vehicle). A bigger car which conveys a sense of “power” and importance. Driving around in a Tata Nano or any other cheaper car will not convey this. And SUVs are expensive. The good ones cannot be bought for a price of Rs 5-8 lakh. And so you UP MLAs need Rs 20 lakh to buy a car.
The logic is similar to that of politicians taking the risk of going around in “helicopters”, given that so many of them keep crashing and killing them. A politician flying in a helicopter and landing in an open field, dust flying around everywhere, thousands of people waiting to have a look at him and hear him speak, creates a sense of awe, power and importance among the voters.
So will Akhilesh now allow his MLAs to buy helicopters and bill it to the state? That of course won’t happen, given that the media has successfully nipped his “car for MLAs” scheme in the bud.
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 4,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/india/why-the-upa-mla-needs-a-rs-20-lakh-car-367173.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])