Why banks use beautiful women as marketers, By Bisi Daniels

Let’s be sincere about this. No pretences. Under normal human circumstances, or practically, if a busy male executive has a bank marketer waiting for him, is he more likely to be willing to see a beautiful lady marketer or a man? Even if the executive were a woman, she is likely to be more comfortable with a female marketer.

 

There are strong reasons for the increasing use of beautiful women as marketers for bank deposits, as the above, and other reasons to be cited shortly, show. Same reason beautiful women are used as hostesses by airlines. The reason we complain is the abuse of this psychological fact by some banks that break the moral limits.

Stakeholders have continued to lament the use of women, especially pretty ones, as marketers by financial institutions to source for deposits. Some banks are known to engage female employees and set for them very high targets on deposit mobilization and other asset creation ventures, which put them under undue pressure to use whatever they have to get what their employers want.

There is an often-cited case of a married woman in Enugu who filed an N1billion sexual exploitation suit against her former employer – a deposit money bank.

According to the suit, the woman was asked by her boss to solicit for the account of a high-profile politician with any means necessary. When she was unable to get the account, she was demoted.

Her boss then asked her to market the bank’s products at a hotel where rich and influential people often visited. She stated in the suit that her boss asked her to “wear pricey perfume and short skirts in order to flaunt her legs, and also suggested that she should not hesitate to take prospective depositors to the hotel if the occasion called for it”.

According to the report, the woman said she filled the suit against the bank to highlight the plight of female banking staff “who are forced to sell their soul to the devil by prostituting on behalf of the banks”.

Many people have shared their experience with female marketers, who seem to be under pressure to do everything, almost, to get prospective male customers’ money in their banks.

And that is where stakeholders complain. Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Godwin Emefiele has added his voice to it. He says the practice goes against the grains of acceptable ethical conduct and corporate governance. He noted that the practice could induce negative moral implications.

According to him, forcing bank marketers, especially females to meet unrealistic deposit targets could influence their decision to engage in illegal and immoral acts.

Under normal circumstances firms use women for this role because of their psychological advantage over men. Women are known to have good people skill and are capable of building strong relationships with customers.

According to psychologists, women have natural social skills and acute emotional antennae, which make them ideal candidates for marketing success.

Women are adept in getting in the door faster Also, they are also more adept in getting in the door faster than men. Psychologists have also observed that pretty ladies tend to have their way easily with some men.

Studies by Harvard university researchers and also by the Department of Management Science and Engineering at China’s Zhejiang University have shown that that beauty effectively overrides men’s capacity to behave rationally.

To research the effect of beauty on the male mind, the Zhejiang University academics found that the prettier the woman, the more likely we are to throw caution to the wind, leap to a decision and not consider the potential consequences of our actions.

Scientifically, conceding to the demands of a beautiful woman is said to “arouse [our] reward-related neural circuitries,” according to the authors of the study. By making them happy, we make ourselves happy – even if this means sacrificing our ideals or integrity.

The Harvard researchers also observed that a beautiful woman’s face “is like chocolate, cash or cocaine to a young man’s brain.”

 

 

Many other studies support this observation of the effect of women on men.

Men take undue risk to impress women: Australian researchers tested this idea when they observed groups of young men skateboarding. When there weren’t any girls around, the guys tended to play it safe and sane.

However, when the researchers asked pretty girls to show up and observe the skateboarders, they ended up taking more stupid risks and trying more impressive moves.

Further analyses suggest that this increase in risk taking is caused in part by elevated testosterone levels of men who performed in front of the attractive female. 

The results suggest that men use physical risk taking as a sexual display strategy, and they provide suggestive evidence regarding possible hormonal and neural mechanisms.

Pretty women make men dumb: Men literally become dumb after they interact with a woman they find attractive. In a study, men scored less on cognitive tests after meeting women. In a version of the test, the men weren’t even looking at females. They were just told that females are going to be looking at them.

And this holds true for women, men don’t really know very well, and also when men are texting on the phone with women, without even seeing their faces.

The 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even when men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about. Sanne Nauts and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands ran two experiments using men and women university students as participants.
In today’s society, people frequently interact with each other over the phone or online, where the only way to infer somebody’s gender is through their name or voice. Nauts’ research suggests that even with very limited interactions, men may experience cognitive impairment when faced with the opposite sex. The researchers think that the reason may have something to do with men being more strongly attuned to potential mating opportunities. Generally, it all looks like whenever we face situations where we’re particularly concerned about the impression that we’re making, we may literally have difficulty thinking clearly. In the case of men, thinking about interacting with a woman is enough to make their brains go a bit fuzzy

Women make men impatient: Researchers have observed that simply looking at a good-looking woman decreases a man’s patience and willpower.

The study involved testing how likely participants were to “discount the future” after viewing pictures of attractive or unattractive members of the opposite sex. Discounting is choosing to receive a small sum of money tomorrow instead of a large one in the future.

The results of the study showed that men who looked at pictures of pretty women were more likely to choose the small sum of money. But men who looked at unattractive women primarily chose the larger sum.

Women also generally chose the larger sum regardless of whether or not the men they looked at were attractive.

Conclusion: Obviously, some banks are taking undue advantage of this psychological advantage of female marketers, turning it into some sort of corporate prostitution. They do this by encouraging or leaving female marketers with no option than to sleep with men for deposits to meet near impossible targets. The situation is complicated by the fact that some ladies are pushed by biting unemployment into accepting the terms of the banks, and to keep mum about it. However, although deposits are to banks what blood is to the human body, the hope is that business has conscience these days – not all about profit maximization.