Does sex sell?

By Katherine Thorsteinson, Staff Writer

via adland.tv

“In advertising, sex sells. But only if you’re selling sex,” says Jef I. Richards, chair of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing at Michigan State University. This simple observation reflects common sense but it also flies in the face of everything we thought we knew about sex and sales. After all, if sex doesn’t sell everything well, why are we constantly being bombarded by the ‘sex-idea’ and body images in general advertising campaigns? Some evidence from market research and psychological analysis might help us to discover what ‘lies beneath the skin’ of sexual marketing strategies.

A study conducted by Brad Bushman and Angelica Bonacci at Iowa State University suggests that images of sex and violence reduce a viewer’s ability to remember advertising content. The study was comprised of 162 men and 162 women between 18 and 54 years of age who varied in terms of their appreciation for violent and sexually explicit material. They were given a series of violent, sexual, or neutral advertisements to watch in random order.

Each participant watched the same advertisements for various products that ranged in market appeal. They were then asked to remember the particular brands included in the programming directly after and twenty-four hours after the viewing. The results indicated that neutral advertisements held a 39% audience-recall advantage over the violent and sexually explicit advertisements—for which commercial memory was found to be about equally unfavourable.

Further studies on effective advertising campaigns have been conducted by various magazines and market research companies. The marketing and media magazine Advertising Age, published their compilation of the top one hundred most effective advertisements of the century. Out of all these, only eight included sexual content. The top twenty most viewed automobile advertisements, as tracked by Unruly Media’s viral video counter, includes only one with sexual content. First place in this list was held by Volkswagen’s “The Force” advertisement which depicted their ‘Fun Theory’ campaign.

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So, if all the best and the brightest in the advertising industry know that sex doesn’t always sell, why are they trying to sell us on the idea that it does? The reason is that ‘sex’ is not usually included in these advertisements at all. Rather, it’s what I call the ‘sex-idea’ that companies push in their commercial images. The ‘sex-idea’ is more closely synonymous with shock value than it is with actual sex and rests more on the power of taboo rebellion than on sensual pleasure.

Back when sex was taboo, advertisements that included its images were shocking, new, rebellious, and memorable. But when companies increasingly began to compete with one another over these profitable results, they were forced to manipulate and alter the form of these images so that they could forever remain on the forefront of market evolution.

This survival of the fittest type scenario helps to explain why fashion images now represent pre-pubescent and often actively asexual content. The ‘sex-idea’ has now gotten so tired that it has shifted to include anti-sexual images in order to subvert the commonly accepted practise of using sexually explicit material to sell products. Thus it seems that advertisers have in fact responded to studies such as those previously mentioned. They have merely triggered the mutation of the ‘sex-idea’ to include anti-sex and sex-satire. The key to this strategy’s success is that audiences continue to believe that sex sells and continue to be impressed by the fact that we are being sold on anti-sexual content.

It is unclear whether sex itself is shifting with these changes in the ‘sex-idea.’ What is certain is that the impetuous to sell and the desire to buy continue regardless of the current cultural climate or the popular methods used. With this will follow further meta-advertising considerations which will in turn impact marketing strategies. So although sex may not always sell, they do share the indefinable and forever evolving feature of seduction.

ARB Team
Arbitrage Magazine
Business News with BITE.

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