Sex Appeal in Advertising and Its Effect

ABSTRACT

Sex Appeal in Advertising and Its Effect

-A Theoretical and Empirical Study-

Cho Sang-ik(Department of Business Administration Graduate School, Chonnam National University Kwangju, Korea)

I. Introduction

It almost goes without saying that in recent years there has been an increase in the use of sexual themes and erotic stimuli in advertising, and furthermore, the expression of sex appeal is more overt and blatant. However, this trend is by no means new one. That is why for many years various forms of sex appeal, most of them quite mild and largely inoffensive, have been used in reaching the consumer in behalf of a variety of products ranging from personal hygine to automobiles. Advertisers and their clients have been using the sex appeal as one of the important strategies in their advertising.

Considerable researches on the issue of sex appeal were presented by researchers in the area of consumer behavior and social-psychology abroad, especially in America. But many researches regarding the use of sex appeal in advertising produced several conflict results. Despite these results the evident fact drawn from these researches is that sexual stimuli in advertisement can elicit attention to it.

In spite of the sexually-oriented advertising and its increased use little research has been directed toward the impact of such advertisements on consumer attention, attitude, or behavior in Korea.

The purpose of this research is to review theoretical background for predicting and understanding the effect of sex appeal in advertising, to summarize the prior researches of marketing area, and to measure the communication effect of sexy advertisements by comparing that of non-sexual advertisements empirically.

II. Review of Theories and Summary of the Previous Studies

One possible reason for the relative scarcity of researches regarding the sexual advertisements is that it is due to a theoretical emptiness. By and large, little research has been directed toward theoretical concepts which are most important in understanding the effectiveness of sexually-oriented advertising stimuli and consumer response to such advertisements.

In the section several useful theories for understanding sexy advertisements were reviewed. And also the limited amount of research from marketing and consumer behavior as well as socialpsychology which uses sexually-oriented suggests as stimuli were summarized.

First, the useful theories for explaining the effect of sex appeal in advertising can be summarized as follow.

2) Arousal and Attention

Arousal, usually defined as the degree of tension in the body, is a physiological state shich gives rise to attention and search in the consumer decision-making process. In the context or sexually-oriented stimuli arousal caused by such stimuli can be thought to relate directly to attention toward the particular advertisement and may be mediated by the consumers' innate motivational state. But non-sexually-oriented stimuli may not have caused the same degree of arousal. The primary conclusion that must be drawn form arousal theory is that, relative to a non-sexy advertisement, a sexually-oriented communication will(perhaps significantly) increase the level of consumer attention to the ad. Among monitoring devices which could track physiological responses to sexy ad, there are galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, eye movements, response speed, heart beat, and breathing patterns.

2) Selective Perception

This is usually defined as the complex process by which consumers select, organize, and interpret sensory stimulation and can be used as the theoretical basis for studying the strength and ambiguity of sexually-oriented ads. Selective perception has two important concepts, absolute threshold and differential threshold, which may provide important clues as to how consumers ultimatly interpret and evaluate advertisements using sexual themes. Especially differential threshold concept may be useful in explaining the difference between a sexually-oriented stimulus perceived as being tasteful, meaningful, and appealing and another stimulus perceived as tasteless and offensive.

3) Self-Concept

Self-concept refers to the totality of the individual's thoughts and feelings having reference to himself as an abject. The types of self-concept generally can fall into three catogories such as actual-self, ideal-self, and social-self concept. Among these more inportant self-concepts in marketing are actual and ideal-self-concept. Self-concept theory suggests that a sexually-oriented stimulus must be appropriate for the product and congruent to the values of the recipient of the ad in order for the desired response or projection to occur.

4) Distraction Hypothesis

People counterargue with a message that contradicts their own heliefs and attitudes, and thus reject any change in their beliefs and attitudes. Therefore, any strategy that serves to interfere with or reduce counterargumentation is worth consideration. In this situation one possible strategy is the use of sexual stimuli in ad. In case of blocking counterarguments of a hostile receiver, a sexy stimulus distracts the consumer and no counterarguments are initiated. This fact says that the consumer remembersㆍless about the ad, but is persuaded more than if a nondistracting stimules in ad. While the experimental evidence seems contradictory, humor, background music, noise and sexual distraction, even if they are irrelevant to the product being advertised, can play a positive role in the communication process.

5) Aggression Theory

The long-held interest is whether sexual stimuli and aggressive behavior are correlated or not. Today many researches concurred in the possibility that there may be a connection between sexualy-oriented stimuli and aggressive behavior on the part of individuals who are exposed to these stimuli, Although a thorough review of the aggression/sexual stimuli reveals no managerial significance, undoubtedly there would be strong social and public policy implication if the data revealed evidence of a positive relationship (or, worse yet, a cause and effect relationship) between viewing sexually-oriented stimuli and aggressive behavior.

6) Physical Attractiveness

People do seem to use physical attractiveness as a cue in making extensive inferences about the personality of others. Therefore, advertising research also has been directed at assessing the impact of the physical attractiveness of the individuals in an ad on subjects' perceptions of the ad. The result from the previous studies suggests that attractive models contribute, though limited, to increase reliability of ad and a communication effectivenss. Especially a reserach showes that physical attractiveness was positively related to the evaluation of the advertisement as well as the product being advertised. However, physical attractiveness in ad was negatively related to the brand recall.

Secondly summaries of priori studies regarding the effect of sexual stimuli in ad are as follow.

a) Sex appeals in ad have an ability to elicit attention.

b) Sex appeals have no effect or negative effect on the brand recall and brand recognition, but have a positive effect on memorizing ad itself.

c) In case of communication effectiveness sexual appeals in ad make it low, though the impact on affective component is higher than non-sexual appeals.

d) Excessive sex appeals seem to make the consumers' attitudes toward the ad, the products being advertised and the company negative.

e) Favorability of evaluations on the ad, the products and the company producing the product increases as product/model congruency increases.

III> Empirical Research

The purpose of the present study is to examine whether advertising using sex appeals is mofr effective on the communication and good evaluation of advertised product quality than advertising using non-sex appeals, that is product only advertisement, as well as to see how consumers recognize about the amount of sex appeal used in ads today. In addition this study will measure the favorability on the ad itself.

1) Operational Definition of Sex Appeal

According to the previous studies regarding the use of sex appeal in advertising this study defined sex appeal in limited concepts as nudity and physical attractiveness. Other types of sex appeal such as suggestiveness, double entendre and sexual embedding are not studied because of the purpose of this study and yarious limitation in research method.

In this study ad using sex appeal is divided into two categories : the functional sex appeal ad in which the model in ad serves a communication role, under the conditions that there are relationships between the model and the adverlised product, and the exploitative sex appeal ad in which the model only serves a titillating function, under the conditions that there are no relationships between the model and the advertised product. Especilly the latter is the object which taps the frequent outcry against using sex appeal in ad from the social and moral perspectives.

2) Respondents

Respondents consist of 182 students (collegian) and 89 adults. Most of respondents were selected from C university students and their parents. All respondents were allocated to the experimental group or the control group.

3) Instrument and Research Design

In order to study this research three types of products used in questionnaires were shoes, cosmetic and film. The first two products represented the functional sex appeal ad and the other the exploitative sex appeal. Two ads for each product were selected from newspaper : one using sexual illustration as experimental ads, the other focusing on the product itself as control ads. The brand names of each product were the same except those of film in which did not exist brand loyalty among consumers as a result of pretest.

The type of measuring method used in this research was questionnaires. Questionnaires consisted of several items to measure the effectiveness of ad. The items were chosen so as to tap all three components (cognitive, affective, and cognitive components) of an attitude and because they had been used successfully by companies in testing advertising copy. Each item was measured on a seven-point semantic differential scale. Questionnaires also include the items about the demographic variables such as sex and age.

The independent variables used in this study are product type, sex appeal, age, and sex. The dependent variables are the mean scores of three components (cognitive, affective, and conative). Data were mostly analyzed by means of ANOVA technique.

4) Results

As a result of this research, in respect to communication effectiveness the experimental advertisements using sex appeals is less than the control advertisements focusing on product itself. Even in the affective component, there was not so much difference between the control ads and the experimental ads in shoes product.

Important result form this study was that young women, coed, evaluated the advertisement using exploitative sex appeals very negatively. Therefore, concerning the ad using exploitative sex appeal communication effect was lower than the ad not using sex appeals in all component for young women, the use of female body in ad as sexual object or sexual stimuli must be considered carefully.

Statistically significant difference was not found in the perception of product quality between the control ads and the experimental ads. So it seems that consumers evaluated the product quality by product itself.

With regard to recognition about the amount of sex appeal used in ads today, a total mean value of 5.02 (with using 7-point scale) indicated that there was a considerably strong agreement with study statement and that there exists conservative thoughts in not only adults but also young people in Korea. But statistically significant differences existed in age, that is the older age group produced a mean response which was higher than that of the younger age group.

Consumer attitudes toward advertisement itself were very negative in case of advertising using sex appeals. What is more interesting is that even in the ads using sex appeals, a favorable score of the exploitative sex appeal ad was much lower than that of the functional sex appeal ad. This result indicates that when marketers use sex appeal in their ads it would be more effective that they use functional sex appeals which is congruent with the product being advertised.

5) Discussion and Suggestion for Future Research

Until now we have studied on the communication effect of sex appeal in ads and other topics. Because little research was presented on this issue in Korea and because although this study played a role of pioneer, it has many limitation in research method, theoretical background, etc., it is premature to draw any general concluding in this area.

Therefore, a lot of better designed further studies are urgently needed.