Is less more?
Back in the 1950s Marilyn Monroe and her hourglass shaped body was the aesthetic ideal for how models were to look like. Nowadays, the tide has turned. Research has shown that female models are becoming increasingly taller, narrower and straighter. This trend has occurred despite the fact that both men and women (still) prefer medium sized women with curvy bodies. This essay examines if this trend can be justified from a marketer's perspective. In concrete terms, the essay examines how changes in a female models body mass index (BMI) and/or waist to hip ratio (WHR), in a print-ad for swimwear and sunscreen, affects recipients' attitudes towards the promoted product, the brand and the actual ad. The female model's BMI was modified from 16 to 22, in three steps, with help of digital retouching. Each BMI category was then divided into two WHR groups (1.0 and 0.7). The result shows that there is no proven statistical connection between the female model's body characteristics and recipients' attitudes towards the product, the brand and the ad. The study contributes to research in the sense that it examines important causations within marketing that previous researchers seem to have taken for granted. In this essay marketers can find both support and guidance that using healthy looking models with normal body mass and WHR won't affect recipients' attitudes towards the ad.