When Sara Lee developed a new line of snack cakes, the company discovered that consumers with low self-esteem preferred portion-controlled snack items because they felt they lacked self-control. Self-esteem refers to the positivity of a person’s self-concept. People with low self-esteem expect that they will not perform very well, and they will try to avoid embarrassment, failure, or rejection. Most of us don’t seem to have that problem. We believe we deserve good things, and we want them now.
Alberto-Culver uses a self-esteem appeal to promote a new product that reflects our changing society: Soft & Beautiful Just for Me Texture Softener, an alternative to hair pressing or relaxing. It’s targeted to white mothers who don’t know how to care for the hair of their multiracial children who have “hair texture” issues. The self-esteem portion of the campaign, dubbed “Love Yourself. Love Your Hair,” includes a Web site, texturesoftener.com, that offers “conversation starters” to help parents find ways to talk to their daughters about self-image.
Indeed, many people must have really strong egos these days to judge by the bravado they display in offering themselves up for inspection on the Web. Millions have posted their photos to be rated by visitors to hotornot.com, a hot Web site where visitors rate each picture on a scale from 1 to 10. One of the site’s two creators remembers, “Basically, we were sitting around drinking beers in the middle of the afternoon when a comment Jim made about a woman he had seen at a party made us think, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Web site where you could tell if a girl was a perfect 10?” The phenomenal success of the site spawned hundreds of copycats, many of them not exactly the PG-rated environment that this site offers. Some of the photos people send in aren’t what you would call flattering (especially the ones submitted as jokes on unsuspecting friends); one possible explanation is the psychological concept of self-handicapping, where we set ourselves up for failure so that, in case ratings are low, we can blame the picture rather than ourselves. Another is that the world is crowded with people so hungry for attention that they will submit to any number of indignities to have others look at them.[31]
Marketing communications can influence a consumer’s self-esteem. Exposure to ads portraying (often unrealistic) buff men and svelte women can trigger a process of social comparison, where the person tries to evaluate herself by comparing it to the people these artificial images depict. This act of evaluating is a basic human tendency, and many marketers tap into our need for benchmarks by supplying idealized images of happy, attractive people who just happen to be using their products. A recent ad campaign for Clearasil is a good example. In one typical ad, two teenage boys enter a kitchen where a 40-ish mother is mixing something in a bowl. When her son leaves the room, his friend hits on Mom. The ad’s tagline: “Clearasil may cause confidence.”
A study that illustrates the social comparison process showed that female college students tend to compare their physical appearance with models in advertising. Furthermore, study participants who were exposed to beautiful women in advertisements afterward expressed lowered satisfaction with their own appearance, as compared to other participants who did not view ads with attractive models.[32] Another study demonstrated that young women alter their perceptions of their own body shapes and sizes after they watch as little as 30 minutes of TV programming.[33] Researchers report similar findings for men.[34]
Self-esteem advertising attempts to change our attitudes toward products by stimulating positive feelings about the self. One strategy is to challenge the consumer’s self-esteem and then show a linkage to a product that provides a remedy. For example, the Marine Corps uses this strategy with its theme “If you have what it takes....” Another strategy is outright flattery, as when Virginia Slims cigarette ads proclaim, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”