The Economic Reality of Real Housewife Fighting

Women need real money to live. Real Housewives even more than most. The houses, furnishings, cars, clothes, hair and makeup are not provided by the show. They make a heavy nut. The highest earning wives may be able to cover their costs of being on the show through their salaries (or pre-existing revenue streams). But for the others, it can be a tight stretch.

Which is why the fights.

Or at least most of them.

The low and middle earning housewives desperately need to monetize by peddling goods and services through an indirect product placement approach;

‘Oh these? Well, my good friend has a business that…’

The higher-earning wives are a bit more savvy in their product curation & implementation. But both groups need airtime.

Which is why the fights.

The franchise isn’t really (and hasn’t been for years) about the lives of well-to-do wives in various cities living their lives, getting into trouble with their friends & then resolving their issues. The franchise is merely, utterly a female hybrid of Shark Tank + The Apprentice.

Which is why the fights.

And why former Apprentice contestant, Bethanny Frankel was able to vault herself to the top of the housewife sweepstakes. From whence she became a template and target for all other housewives.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Although it crosses the line into unbelievably phony when she spends her entire season fussing about the image of a brand she built on the back of drawn out, sometimes viscous, always funny, fights with her colleagues all those seasons ago.

Girl, please.

And this is precisely where Sponsors need to worry. When their Housewife-platforms become too precious about the very essence of the show.

The fights.

While ‘Work Nicely, Together as One in Harmony’ may make for a lovely TedTalk or Big Tech slogan, the reality of business is that it’s a hyper competitive dog fight.

All the happy-clappy doublespeak churned out by Corporate America is the big unreality. A marketing ploy to make consumers & potential employees ignore the fundamental truth of sales.

It’s a fight.

Especially to grab attention for a product. Pricing and function aren’t worth a damn thing if no one knows you.

Which is why despite all the facades & charades, the ‘Real Housewives’ franchise is the most genuine contemporary account of how business is actually conducted. If the lying, whoring & fictional Don Draper can launch a thousand real marketing campaigns, why fear the drama these non-fictional women bring?

In a global economy where every business is loudly, often falsely, certainly righteously preening about it’s ‘moral goodness’, consumers are dying for a little honesty.

To earn a buck is a brutal, rarely ‘nice’ affair.

We all know this.

Potential sponsors for these wives would do well to embrace this struggle to sell their products. It might be messy, but it’s entertaining and certainly nowhere near as phony as the vast majority of corporate comm.

The fights are the go-to-market for their products. Brands should lean into them