A marketing manager for a management consulting firm (NOT a client of mine, by the way) e-mailed me a couple of photos of his firm’s consultants at a client engagement along with a simple question: which photo should they use in their new capabilities brochure?<\/p>\n
The two photos were:<\/p>\n
(a) An average looking, middle-aged male consultant giving a flip chart presentation to a roomful of male clients.<\/p>\n
(b) A young, blond, and extremely attractive female consultant giving a flip chart presentation to a roomful of male clients.<\/p>\n
Both people were real employees of the firm at an actual client engagement — the same client, in fact.<\/p>\n
I thought I could answer quickly, but then I was stumped.<\/p>\n
Does it really matter which consultant you use in the photo? Should it matter?<\/p>\n
If it makes a difference, would business clients be more persuaded by (a) the middle aged (and presumably more experienced) male or (b) the younger and frankly sexier (but not overtly sexy; she was dressed in appropriate, conservative business attire) female?<\/p>\n
How would you vote — and why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A marketing manager for a management consulting firm (NOT a client of mine, by the way) e-mailed me a couple of photos of his firm’s consultants at a client engagement along with a simple question: which photo should they use in their new capabilities brochure? The two photos were: (a) An average looking, middle-aged male […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}