Impact of Sexual Appeals on Attention Getting and Memory

Section I: Impact of sexual appeals on attention getting and memory

Through this first section, we shall argue the impact of using nudity in advertisements on attracting the attention of the consumers and persisting in their memories and therefore if affects negatively or positively their persuasion process and purchase decisions.

1.1 Sexual appeals attract consumers’ attention

From a theoretical point of view, the persuasion process is strongly influenced by capturing the attention of the consumers (MacKenzie, 1986). Consumers proved to make their purchase decisions based on the memorization of the stimulus and not at the time of exposure to ads messages. However, using nudity in advertising can affect brand recall negatively as it distracts the attention of the audience and make the careful thoughts difficult. The emotions arousing after being exposed to a nudity ad can orient the attention from the information to the source of these emotions as they reduce the estimation and value of the product in question (Clark and Isen, 1982; Gilligan and Bower, 1984).

Various studies evaluate, for both managerial and educational motives, the effectiveness of nudity advertising in attracting audience’s attention. Particularly because lots of advertisers resort to this medium in order to overcome the tough competition and pierce the buyer’s perception. The advertisers’ practices have evolved in all the fields and the exposure to ads comprising sexual appeals increased due to the amplified number of adverts bombarding the audience every day. At first, an attractive woman was associated with a product targeting men only to attract their attention. The impact of these ads on attention getting and brand awareness was measured through male resp...

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...nonsexual appeals. Regarding its effect on the memory, Reid and Soley (1981, 1983) found that ads with decorative female models increased memory for the image in the ad; specifically if the product categories are to a certain extent relevant to the sexual information as perfume, liquor or swimming suits. On the other hand, although those ads have been criticized many times for distracting viewers and preventing them from processing the info, in fact in real life, consumers are exposed to the ads several times and consequently afford learning the information about the brand.

Based on what we have exposed previously about the role of advert containing nudity in assuring better memory toward the ad, we present our second working thesis:

H2: an advertisement that contains nudity prompts better memory toward the advertisement than does an advertisement without nudity.