Defending booth babes once again

A while back on Twitter, Rob Donoghue tweeted a link that got my attention.

A certain Lydia Leong, a research director in the Technology and Service Providers group at Gartner made a blog post about her thoughts on HostingCon and the fact that several exhibitors brought booth babes.

Ms. Leong went into your typical femi-nazi rant in which she gave a rather amusing set of uninformed “reasons” why vendors should not bring booth babes.

Of course, I have defended booth babes before on this site, and I will probably do so again in the future – so why not do it again right now?

Ms. Leong went the standard route and completely disregarded the fact that promotional models serve to provide information about the product or service and make it appealing to consumers. While the length of interaction may be short, the promotional model delivers a live experience that reflects on the product or service he or she is representing.

The consumer’s perception of a brand, product, service, or company, is often more profoundly affected by a live person-to-person experience. The influence of this type of marketing may be more enduring as well. They’re also rather skilled at screening the mass of show attendees for target consumers or at obtaining attendee information so that they may be solicited after the show.

Here are the aforementioned “reasons”:

1. You imply your audience is immature and/or unprofessional. Booth babes imply that you think that your audience’s primary interest is in staring at boobs, as opposed to getting serious business done. Moreover, there’s no way to look professional while ogling, and even those people who would like to ogle don’t want to do so in front of people that they’re doing business with. Unless you’re E3 and your audience is adolescents and overgrown adolescents, this is a bad tactic. (And you can argue that booth babes ended up significantly contributing to the death of E3 as a serious trade show.)

I seriously doubt that car companies like Ford or Chevrolet imply that their audience is either immature or unprofessional when they employ booth babes at their automotive expos, nor are firms like Microsoft, Samsung or L’Oreal.

And “the death of E3 as a serious trade show”? E3 is widely considered to be the ultimate expo in the video game industry that brings in tens of thousands of people every year.

As far as the crack at only “adolescents and overgrown adolescents” attending E3 – I’m not even going to touch that one.

2. You imply that your company’s offerings are less interesting than the flesh on display. Yes, everyone needs to do something to draw in traffic, but booth babes smack of desperation. But you do this by having a compelling display that makes people want to come have conversations, not by having booth babes shoving trinkets at people. People grab the trinkets and then don’t have the conversations.

No one is implying that their offerings are less interesting than the booth babes themselves. They are using a tactic that has been in service in the US for almost 100 years. That’s a century, folks. It isn’t anything new. Hell, Gallup & Robinson, an advertising and marketing research firm has reported that in more than 50 years of testing advertising effectiveness, it has found the use of the erotic to be a significantly above-average technique in communicating with the marketplace.

3. You actually make it harder for people to get to the booth itself. This is especially true on crowded show floors, where the booth babes basically form a wall in front of your booth. This makes it hard to see your display, your collateral, and the nametags of the people you have staffing your booth (important for any attendee who is trying to do some networking). Chances are that a lot of people simply don’t make it through the obstacle, especially if they’re casually perusing the floor, rather than looking for you specifically.

This is complete and total B.S. I have been to a few dozen different expos, trade shows, and conventions – and the booth babes were never in the way of the booth. They exist to get you to the booth – not prevent it.

Ms. Leong and those of her mindset – booth babes are not the problem. People like you are the problem.

It is undeniable that opportunities exist for attractive men and women based solely on their looks. If it wasn’t for this, we wouldn’t have an entertainment industry. Attempting to prevent attractive people from capitalizing on their looks is an unjust infringement of their rights as people.

You cannot argue with the fact that human attraction is what it is. It is genetic. Stop trying to change people from doing what they do naturally and attempting to hide it behind complaints against convention organizers or vendors. Railing against pretty people seems like little more than blatant jealousy.