Sexual Appeals In Advertising Essay

Does sex absolutely sells? Analysis of the sexual appeals in advertisements

Introduction

According to Courtney and Whipple (1983), sexual appeals in advertisements could be defined as the way to convert the sexual urge into the element tool in the ad, it contains nudity, sexual imagery, innuendo, and double entendre which could be applied in a variety of products. Some experts are of the opinion that sexual appeals in advertisements are all of those contain both sexy male and female models (Batra and Ray, 1986). However, Biswas (1992) suggests that it is not only the model nudity, intense emotion and erotic verbal are also the sexual appeals in advertisements. The characteristic of the sexual appeals in advertisements could be divided into

(1990) researched mainly about the effectiveness of distinct sexual appeals in advertisements, furthermore, the verbal information of different levels. Besides knowing the impact by using the traditional effectiveness measure examination, the research also comprised the cognitive respond measure to comprehend the process of both sexual and non-sexual appeals in advertisements better. The research hypothesized that the use of the sexual illustration in the advertisement would detract the ability of the receiver than non- sexual appeal (Baker, 1961), which has been expected. In addition, it is predicted that the utility of sexual illustration would get a result of positive attitude, which would also have a higher purchase intention. The result of the examination showed that the receiver would pay more attention on the advertisement execution than the content of the message while be given the explicit sexual advertisement (Severn et al., 1990). The brand name recall result seemed to be more functional in the ad information level than the sexual explicitness of the

The later two articles have used a common reference, which is the first article written by Peterson and Kerin (1977). Most of the references of Simpson et al.’s (1996) have overlapped with Severn et al.’s (1990).

Conclusion

To sum up, the literature review has reported and evaluated the content of the effectiveness of sexual appeals in advertisements. Regarding the present advertisements, marketers should consider clearly whether congruency between product and model have match up while making decisions of sexual appeals in advertisements, in addition, the degree of the nudity should be appropriate in order to gather the brand recall from the audience.

Although all of the three articles have the limitation in some areas, the result and analysis of the research still have a significant contribution in the industry and for the future studies. In terms of answering the review question, both articles of Peterson and Kerin (1977) and Severn et al. (1990) have some very useful points; however, in order to compensate the insufficient and limitation of these studies, it still need further research to improve and go deeper of the