I recently thought about that while mulling over an article I had read in Psychology Today ("Peek Season: In winter, oglers aren't choosers." January/February 2009). It was about research revealing that men find women's bodies and breasts sexiest in the winter and least arousing in the summer. No kidding. And I thought to myself, 'Self, those researchers are pretty smart guys,' (safely assuming, I believe, that all the researchers were guys). Further, I would bet that some of those researchers have wives to whom they have given some sort of scientific jibber jabber to justify such studies. Now, if I had only said to Mrs. Miller that I wanted to grow up to be a social scientist to analyze the effects of the seasons on men's primal urges, who knows, I may not have been kicked out of class.
Anyway, it seems that during the summer months, when on the beaches and on the streets female flesh can be seen in abundance, men's standards go up. And it is during the winter months that men sink to the lowly level of a hound dog.
No shit.
I mean, on the surface, this may seem like very respectable research. It may even have preserved the marriages of those researchers, but I don't buy it. Actually, it's not that I don't buy it––it's that I don't think the conclusion warranted serious research. It seems like common sense to me. All smart advertisers know this.
Isn't it the thinking behind differentiation?
Differentiation isn't just about being different. It's about standing out when it counts. The thinking goes back to Aristotle.
Aristotle understood that in comparing things, we sometimes discover not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. It's not that during one season women aren't sexy and in another they are. After all, to most men, breasts maintain a certain year-round attraction. The choice isn't between having something and not having something, or between good and bad, but between a greater good and a lesser good.
In cases like this, Aristotle had a principle: What is scarce is greater than what is abundant.
Like, let's say you have the Vale, Colorado, tourism account and your target is the aforementioned hound dogs. One approach would be to portray the bits of rosy red cheeks that one would see on the slopes as precious flesh to be savored, enticing specimens with which to rendezvous at the lodge bar over a mug of spiked hot cocoa. You could also appeal to the man's intelligence: What a man of rare, practical wisdom would choose is, for instance, a greater good than what the common, ignorant, sex-craved hound dog would choose. In other words, the brisk outdoors is healthier for one's mind and well being than lying on the beach of say, Jamaica, ogling bimbos and smoking weed.
So, yes, I do believe that those researchers were correct. And I do hope they had a good time at work, too, but it really wasn't necessary, was it, to make it one's life's work. Or was it?
