Women are even nicer than cars. So to be office friendly, I made it so you have to follow the link for the report.
Women are wonderful. As mothers, as sisters, as friends. The female body is a beautiful thing. So why not channel our sex drive into commerce by using lovely ladies to promote their wares? Commonly known as “booth babes” or worse, these women actually provide a vital service to industry by reminding men why they compete. There are three basic types of these charming ladies, with many iterations, each with a role as defined as a bee in a hive.
Image models are hired specifically to draw traffic to the booth. There is a small subset of these ladies, however, who are knowledgeable about the company’s wares and are highly prized as they can both bait and pitch. Many of the latter are actually working for the sales or marketing department. They often dressing conservatively to avoid having you assume they are of the former type. (Yet somehow it makes them look even more appealing to me.) The charming ladies at the Sushi phone jewelry stand are perfect examples of both versions of the latter type. I’ll comment on the explosion of gadget personalization in my CeBIT tech roundup in a day or so. I love it when the booth message creates a visual pun. ( Did you see the Intel roaming docent in the doorway inthe background of image #2?)
Sex and violins. I had to say it.
Docents are charming ladies, usually in uniform, who man the booth, walking around and answering questions. These ladies are prized more for their pleasant disposition, friendly attitude, and ability to express themselves. A subset of these man the information stand, handing out company materials and various tchotchkes carrying the company logo. (I have what I call a “tchotchke index” where I gauge the health of an industry by the average value of the tchotchkes given out by the exhibitors. (If every booth at a show is giving away halloween candy, that industry is in a death spiral.) Note some of the elaborate booths in the background, some as large as a football field. (I’m going to talk about the devices the ladies are holding in upcoming posts, don’t worry.)
Free-range ladies roam the aisles of the trade show and drive traffic to their companies’ booths. They can be of either the model or docent varieties. The former is usually escorted by the latter to keep them out of trouble. You can usually tell which one is which. Uniforms are the norm for these ladies, and some companies go as far as to give all their docents a branded look. The ladies in the last pair of images demonstrated some imagination with their signage (they told me it was the brunette’s idea, and I believe them).
Sometimes they’re even guys. (The Asian lady in the Scotland image was a show attendee who was having her her picture taken with the group by a friend when I came upon them.)
These ladies worked the beer hall on the fairgrounds, which was once used at the German pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. I’ll post about that place and the wild international drunk trade show beerfest that went on there in a separate post. The lady on the right was our server and told us she was a medical student from Munich working the show for some extra dough.
