An interesting article in today’s New York Times: Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales. Excerpt:
Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor’s waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.
Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force. Some keep their pompoms active, like Onya, a sculptured former college cheerleader. On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.
Some industry critics view wholesomely sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands.
But now that federal crackdowns and the industry’s self-policing have curtailed those gifts, simple one-on-one human rapport, with all its potentially uncomfortable consequences, has become more important. And in a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients’ medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation’s doctors, still mostly men.
Read the whole piece.
There’s an obvious parallel, I think, to the college textbook industry. When I first started teaching at PCC, I was stunned by the large number of attractive young women who visited me regularly as representatives of one publishing company or another. At our college, individual professors are allowed total discretion in selecting textbooks for their courses. And this can translate into a great deal of money.
For example, I have three sections of Western Civilzation and two sections of Modern European History. Each has about 40 students enrolled. That’s 200 students who will have to buy the texts I pick. At prices averaging at least $65-75 per book, my text decisions are worth tens of thousands of dollars every year. (I teach intersessions too, of course!)
During my first four or five years at PCC, at least until the late 1990s, I got regular visits from publishing reps. I remember one man who was a regular, and one much older woman who had come out of retirement, but the rest were all young women between about 23-32. Almost all were stereotypically attractive and outgoing. Each repped for a different publishing house, and each of these houses published different textbooks for Western Civ survey courses.
I have always kept up with the latest textbooks in my field. Frankly, however, the top four or five publishing houses all put out remarkably similar texts. Most big companies have several titles in Western Civ; they have books with more of a social/cultural emphasis, books with a straightforward political emphasis, and "brief editions" of their larger offerings. But by and large, I’ve discovered that there’s precious little difference among them. They all cover more or less the same subjects in the same way, and they are all priced within a few dollars of each other.
Because the books are so similar to one another, the textbook reps needed strong and vivacious personalities to sell their product. And flirtation was obviously a strong selling point! I can say with a straight face that I never consciously ordered one particular text based upon the attractiveness of a publisher’s representative, but I won’t deny that in my younger days I did enjoy the visits. Several times, I was taken to relatively inexpensive lunches; I received a host of small, relatively cheap gifts. (I still have an old solar calculator from about 1996; it works just fine.) And of course, I was flirted with fairly consistently.
From a feminist standpoint, I was a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, I was — in my younger days — much more comfortable with casual flirtation than I am now. Though I never dated a textbook rep, I did enjoy the banter and the tension immensely. At the same time, I was always conscious of the fact that these women were paid on commissions; my decisions did affect, in not insubstantial ways, their livelihood. As a pro-feminist man, I knew I had to be very careful about deriving even casual pleasure from an experience with a woman that was based on her economic needs. Many years ago, I decided not to ask out the one textbook rep I found remarkably appealing. I was using her company’s books at the time, and I didn’t want to put her in the position of being afraid to reject me for fear that I would cancel my order. So we flirted and batted our eyes and all that, and I ended up going out with the woman who became my third wife instead. The flirtatious rep moved on to another job, and I switched to a new textbook.
About five years or so, the number of visitors dropped dramatically. Though the prices of textbooks have continued to rise, it seems the publishing companies have cut back on their expenses by hiring few sales reps. I now get only one or two visits a year. Most of the publishers seem to rely on relentless e-mail spam to get me to adopt their books. This never works. Honestly, I’ve stuck with the same text for three years now in my survey courses. It’s a solid one, it’s a tad bit cheaper than the competition, and I haven’t been given any incentive to change. No rep has taken me to lunch since early 2000, if not before — I haven’t gotten so much as a free pen in at least as long.
My boundaries weren’t bad back then, and they are better now. But I wouldn’t mind a new calculator. And I wouldn’t mind being taken out for sushi.