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When he sprayed champagne in the face of an unwilling Chinese podium girl, Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton single-handedly reignited the podium girl debate.
A year ago, Tour of Flanders second place winner, Slovakian cyclist Peter Sagan, caused even bigger outrage when he grabbed the bottom of a podium girl who was busy kissing the winner.
Whether or not Hamilton deserved to cop a spray has already been covered in The Roar. What hasn’t been discussed is whether podium and grid girls are good business.
The most visible ‘girls’ are in Formula 1 and the Tour de France. F1 has a global audience of half a billion viewers and le Tour at least 1.5 billion. F1 and le Tour are all about sponsorship and the podium girl concept is based on the belief that beauty sells. That logic worked when they were introduced in the 1960s and sponsors were selling to an exclusively male audience who made all household purchasing decisions (apart from groceries).
The four jersey sponsors select Le Tour’s podium girls. Criteria are looks, endurance, personality and linguistic abilities. It’s a fair bet that women who gun the last three categories but are on the plain side won’t be in the running.
The 2015 Formula 1 Rolex Australian Grand Prix promises that grid girls will bring, “… trackside glamour back to the grid, the girls will be meeting and greeting fans and posing for photographs every day of the event.”
Peter Sagan’s infamous bum pinch – reason enough to get rid of the podium kiss? (Image: AFP)
In both sports, the women are forbidden to have anything to do with the sportsmen outside the track and podium. A podium peck on the cheek is a job requirement and they speak to sportsmen only when spoken to.
People have an inherent bias towards beauty. Good-looking people make more money and customers prefer to buy from good-looking sales people.
The catch is that this only applies when we are dealing with the opposite sex. When we are dealing with attractive people of our own sex, we are biased against them.
Since the 1960s, purchase decision-making has pivoted 180 degrees. Across the world women make 60-80 per cent of purchase decisions – from consumer goods to large purchases. To sell more, sponsors need to tap into a bigger audience that includes the new purchasing power – women.
Nielsen research shows that women don’t respond to the same advertising psychology as men. Knowing what we do about the same-sex beauty bias, podium girls are more likely to put the brand at a disadvantage by instantly setting off the negative gender bias in women. Which is bad because women need to be paying positive attention to a brand before they will even think of purchasing.
The women sponsors are targeting – the ones with purchasing power – are also likely to wonder why capable, multilingual women are being called ‘girls’. Women don’t respond well to negative comparisons or associations. They remember more and differently, to men.
PETRONAS, Pirelli, Bose, Epson, Blackberry, Slazenger and others sponsor the Mercedes Benz team. When they signed up, it wasn’t for global coverage of their brands plastered across Hamilton behaving in a way that alienated, not attracted, potential customers. Those potential customers have long memories, especially for the negative.
Shifts in purchasing power have flipped podium girl logic on its head. When F1 driver Susie Wolff wins a place, will she get a kiss from a podium girl? Will it be 1960s titillating or 2015 kind of weird? What will women make of sponsors using a subservient, beautiful woman to try and catch their attention?
Two weeks ago, the World Endurance Cars series dropped grid girls. Chief Executive Gerard Neveu said, “It’s old school to have such a concept as grid girls. Surely the world’s moved on? And motor racing should follow quite closely what the rest of the world’s doing in that respect.” According to Neveu “…the star at the end is the sports cars and the drivers of the car.”
It will be interesting to see if promotion based purely on technical excellence, rather than photo ops with eye candy, grows World Endurance Car audiences.
Viewers think they are watching sport. For sponsors, it is just another big billboard and they always follow the purchasing power. Interesting times.
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