Criticism Of Ck's Advertising

Over decades, it seems that CK has positioned itself as an “open” brand. Most of its advertisement “appear to offer a challenge to bourgeois sensibilities regarding properly sexed and coded bodies.” (Metts, 2001). Even if among all the underwear ads, CK’s is extremely difficult to accept. Their images on the ads are usually provocative, they did not only want to present the products, but also try extremely hard on delivering the most erotic scene to stimulate its target audiences. However, most of their target customers are teenagers and young adults, those ads may be inappropriate for them, also, some ads may also contain discrimination on females and indelicate social behavior like gang rape and child pornography. In this part, I will focus

In most of its ads, females are being positioned as a victim that can never win when fighting against males, females in CK’s ads only have two choices when they showed up with males: either she depended on males, or she was forced by males. Like appendix 1 that I mentioned above, a female was being trapped in a room only with her underwear, and the one who trapped her has a high possibility to be a male. Appendix 2 is another CK ad starred by Lara Stone. She was surrounded by three half-naked males. People can rarely take a good look at CK’s underwear in this poster, because all their attention was attracted by the models’ positions. A lot of audiences think that their positions clearly have a sexual implication. It may implicate gang rape and violent behavior. Unsurprisingly, this advertisement had “received backlash from sexual assault workers and women 's ' groups.” (Sanchez,

Problem and Opportunity

A. Problems

1. Most of CK’ ads are controversial, especially the ones that contain females, a lot of them were banned from billboard because they contained sexual implication or inappropriate behaviors like gang rape. Also, CK’s ads always reflect female discriminations, and it is pretty obvious

2. Consumers are getting tired of watching CK’s ads, because they always use the same topic: physically sexy. It is getting old and boring, a lot of other brand are using it as well. CK has already started losing their consumers.

3. CK’s representatives in the ads are always sexy female celebrities, it will simplify CK’s brand image and consumers may find out that it is difficult to change their impression of CK because CK always use similar representatives.

4. CK choose problematic celebrities like Justin Bieber to shoot their ads, which may have negative influence on the brand image.

B.