Checking the suspension can take a new meaning when the lads are buying motors, argues Kathy Sheridan
'Women buy for a reason. Lads settle for the promise. They'll buy a flash car without even asking what's inside." Now, now, Stuart, this is the kind of thing that gets us all into trouble.
"Well, the fact is that men are far easier to sell to. They just buy something to feel good . . ." That, folks, was Stuart, Stuart Fogarty of AFA Advertising. And really, this was as much of a surprise to me as it is for you. But it does - um - turn a few things on their heads.
That endless peering under the bonnet and talk about multi-link rear suspension and four-pot red alloy callipers might look and sound mighty impressive. But, hey, check out the suspension on those birds in the current Rover poster. Four of them. In bikinis. In a boat. Giving a dumb car an unnatural once-over. Phwoar . . .
Does this lend weight to Stuart's thesis? Well, put it like this. Would a woman buy a car on the basis that four deranged females were paid to smirk at it ? Would she buy a car because four oleaginous men were being paid to slither all over it ? The answer is no, she wouldn't.
As Stuart points out, for one thing women generally don't choose a car on the off-chance that it might be a man-magnet. For another, women, as every man with a single brain cell knows, respond to humour above everything.
Doubtless, the creators of the Rover women-in-a-boat concept pitched it as a hip, knowing, ironic, post-modern whatever-you're-having-yourself re-take on the old bird-across-the-bonnet cliché.
So, presumably, it was meant to raise a smile of some kind. On that basis, the Nissan ad showing Sophia Loren sneaking a competitive look down Jayne Mansfield's decolletage, passes the test. But four babes in a boat? You don't get it, you moron, someone is yelping; they're trying to sell this car to MEN. Well, that's headbangingly obvious. But is it wise?
The fact that many women go through their entire lives without the dubious thrill of setting foot in a garage may have led some people astray, but according to Lynne Tracey of Javelin Young Rubicam, which handles the Toyota account, women have the veto - at the very least - over the car-buying decisions in 80 per cent of sales. They make the final decision on car type in at least half.
These are the figures that have forced car manufacturers to sit up and discard the bird-draped-on-car concept as the soaraway height of cool. But a conundrum remains at the heart of the industry. Motor shows, for example, remain overwhelmingly male and pander to the old notions that once underpinned the industry.
An amused and bemused Lynne Tracey says that to this day the shows remain "unreformed and unquestionably sexist with lots of a scantily-clad women and lots and LOTS of men."
Yet, in nearly every other sector of the industry, designers, engineers, advertisers and media outlets of every kind (which explains me, I suppose) have had to work at reversing the old order of things. Car dealers still have a way to go in ambience and attitude but, no doubt, the commercial realities are breaking through.
While advertisers over-compensated for a while in the 1990s (smart-ass women throwing keys down gratings and the like) in their frantic efforts to bring women on board, most seem to have settled into something less war-like, more creative and gender neutral.
The Renault Clio campaign - with its Papa/Nicole interplay - was, says Tracey, the "ultimate politically correct commercial. It tried not to offend anybody and everyone is strong in it - and it was actually a very successful campaign".
Then there was the bright, funny Punto series which, she says, "stood sexism on its head." This showed the woman driver clocking the fact that her male passenger was ogling someone else - whereupon she opened the window, grabbed the nearest man and began to snog him.
Nowadays a car advertiser's target is more about age profile than gender, she says, because the purchaser is as likely to be female as male. The difference, as the targets grow older, is in the detail.
There was a time - and still is, if Jeremy Clarkson is your only source - when car talk was confined to turbo chargers, babes in and out of boats and everything else and 130 mph capability (perfect around Donnybrook at 8.10 am). But the commercial reality now is that when a woman comes looking to discuss the merits of buggy room and air conditioning (to stop the child being car sick), she is more likely to get a respectful hearing.
Is it possible that some people are missing the boat?