Does a baby trump a llama?

For reasons too boring to go into I've been reading a lot about marketing recently and one thing that's been impressed upon me is the importance of a unique selling point (or USP) for your product. What essentially makes your product better than everybody else's?

 

Nowhere is this clearer than on the streets of Cusco, Peru, a town whose main industry is tourism with flocks of tourists from all over the world using it as their jumping off point to Machu Picchu and beyond.

 

Amongst the locals there is a large indigenous population that sticks close to their traditions including wearing traditional dress, mainly involving brightly colored woven shawls and materials. Tourists of course love this and at some point in time the locals realised that they could ask for 1 sol (35cent) donation for each picture. But then you see market forces start to have an effect and before long there must have been many brightly dressed locals clamoring for the same tourist pictures. Enter the USP! I guess the first innovation was when someone brought a llama to 'work' and realised that the tourists loved this authentic taste of Peru in their photographs. Not wanting to be outdone, other photogenic locals then started to carry round their small cute kids. Does a cute kid beat a fully grown llama? Before long the capitalist culture is rife and Cusco is now filled with locals carrying kids, llamas, baby llamas, cute puppies or combinations of all 4. The trump card so far has been a tiny cute 2 year old girl, dressed authentically with a baby llama in one hand a green parrot on her head - needless to say she got all the tourist dollars that day!

 

I am a little divided about how I feel about this. On the one hand I feel that it's a little exploitative of the local population and does not treat them with the respect they deserve. On the other hand it's easy money, and if the tourists want to pay them more for wearing nice clothes and carrying a kids around than they would get from doing a much harder cleaning or cooking job then good luck to them. They've just got to work out how to stay ahead of the game....