סמינר בשיווק

Female models and film actresses are playing a leading role in the fashion industry and therefore affect consumers set of values of appearance and beauty. Nonetheless, in contrast to the dramatic increase of the proportion of overweight and obese individuals in developed countries among youngsters and adolescent females the models’ body size has considerably shrunk over the years. For example, while in the 60’s the ideal beauty body size (e.g. as represented by James Bond girls BMI) was located around the 27% percentile of young females population in the US (in ages 17 to 35) nowadays it is only in the 3% percentile. In this paper, we argue, that the thin females ideal model has an indirect accelerating effect on the overweight epidemic among youngsters. We introduce an economic model in which the individual decision of calorie consumption is affected by two reference points: the weight of the ideal beauty (thin body size) and the median weight of the population Both affect individuals’ decision of calorie consumption. When these two reference points are far apart, the thin ideal point becomes an unreachable goal and, hence, loses its ability to be a restraining force against weight gain. This leads to a continuous increase in the median weight of the entire population. We provide supportive evidence to our theory based on large scale data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). We analyze the US population BMI over the years vis-à-vis the ideal beauty body size proxies while controlling for large sets of demographic variables and food industry data. Our study suggests that previous literature, which blamed thin model as a cause to anorexia, is only private case of our approach.