I Thought She Was Stunning ….. and then She Spoke

 

I grew up in a family where the women have been very competent. My family is filled with matriarchs who managed drove the family to greater heights. As my dad admitted, he wrote the cheques but it was my mother who did the work when it came to making me an educated man. It wasn’t just women who were strong characters. Men were expected to respect their wives. My father did not go for this “scared of his wife,” theory. He called “Respecting her judgement.”

My exposure to women in leadership roles wasn’t limited to my family. I was going to school in the UK in the early 1990s, when the pollical icon for most of my peers was Margaret Thatcher. The classic cartoon of the time had a little girl asking, “Daddy, can a man ever be Prime Minister?”

In a way, Covid vindicated my childhood experiences of seeing women do well in power. The places that seemed to survive Covid were inevitably places run by women like Angela Merkel in Germany, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Sanna Marin in Finland, while the countries that screwed up were inevitably run by aspiring macho men.

However, while the current crop of women in power have been providing much needed competence in running the world, there is, unfortunately a parallel trend of prominent women bringing out the worst in people. I am talking about the likes of former British Home Secretary Priti Patel, who introduced anti-immigration legislation that by her own admission would have bared her parents from entering the UK, Marine Le Penn in France, who has managed to rebrand the far right, xenophobic National Front into the National Rally and give herself as historic 30 over percent of the vote in the two presidential elections she contested and at the time of writing, we now have Giorgia Meloni, of the “Brothers of Italy” party, which is set to win the Italian elections:

 

 Copyright the Transcontinental Times  

What makes these women stand out is the fact that they are very attractive to look at. You could say that everyone of them is a marketing persons dream spokesperson. Attractive women are what you would call the marketing persons dream because everyone likes attractive women. Men cannot help but look at attractive women and women cannot help but look at attractive women.

Unfortunately, this truism about marketing consumer goods applies to marketing politics and a 2017 article in the Independent in the UK found that politicians on the political right tend to better looking than their counterparts on the left of the political spectrum:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/right-wing-politicians-better-looking-left-conservative-labour-socialist-study-professor-janerik-lonnqvist-university-helsinki-a7657516.html

 

 Like it or not, good looks sell and somehow the message seems more compelling when it comes from an attractive woman who sounds reasonable. The most prominent example is Marion Le Penn who made her party votable. Countless of interviewees in France admitted that they would never have voted for her father, whom they thought was a crazy old man but were perfectly comfortable with her. Again, her dad looked like a rabid dog, whereas she was a presentable lady making a presentable case.

However, I am with the late Bill Bernbach of DDB, when he argued that advertising could not save a bad product. As much as I take pride in my experiences in advertising and PR, I believe that the real magic comes from having a decent product or service.

As mentioned earlier, this truism about selling consumer products also applies to politics. A nasty message is still a nasty message regardless of who is delivering it. Sure, I would rather look at and chat to Marion Le Penn than to her father. However, is her message actually different? Same can be said of Ms. Meloni. Who does not want to look at and listen to a sexy blonde? However, when you listen to her thump her chest about God, country and so on, you’ll realise that she’s not far of what Benito Mussolini was doing and my Italian friends would do well to remember how well that turned out for them.

Great packaging isn’t going to hide an ugly product and if you look at the likes of Ms. Meloni or Ms. Le Penn, you’ll see that their message is essentially an ugly one, even if they’ve packaged it exceedingly well.

In democratic systems, people need to remember that they are responsible for choosing their leaders and the results they get. So, its essential that voters listen and understand what they’re voting for. Attractive packaging is just that – packaging.

Every potential voter for these ladies and their ilk need to remember that many men have gone bed with and married women who were beautiful to look at only to find that they were actually ugly people bent on bringing out the ugly in their partners.