Most marketers, if playing word association, would hear the word "sex" and respond with "sells." It's something that we all pretty much take for granted - even those of us doing B2B marketing.
Back in the day, I remember going to one trade show where someone was walking around dressed in a French maid's costume, giving out Twinings tea bags on behalf, if I remember this right, of British Telecom. And I remember another show where one of booths (a pretty good sized one) was manned - well, manned isn't exactly the right word - by booth babes all wearing identical sexy little black dresses. There was one decidedly no nonsense, perfectly attractive but less-than-babish young woman - same black dress, but not a model-look-alike - who seemed to be answering all the questions in the booth. I couldn't help but stop in and ask. Yes, indeed, she was the only company employee in the booth at the time. The other women were, indeed, models hired to draw men into the booth. I can't recall the name of the company or its product, but it was some generic IT-related application. Apparently they weren't interested in the custom of women IT-ers.
But I don't think selling-with-sex is as prevalent in the B2B world as once it was.
Just as well, since an article in a recent Economist (March 3rd) seems to explode the myth that sex sells.
Two University College London psychologists ran an experiment in which they had different groups watch a Sex in the City episode, while others watched Malcolm in the Middle. The Sex episode revolved around the gang trying to figure out whether they were any good in bed, and featured, in addition to the girl talk, scenes that showed kissing, foreplay, nudity and sex in the city. Malcolm was unsexy, family sit-com material.
Sex and Malcolm watchers were divided into subsets, half of whom were shown ads that used sex, half of whom saw ads that didn't.
As it turned out, the folks who'd watched Sex had sex on the brain alright, but all they could remember was the episode, not the brands which were being advertised. It mattered little whether the ads were sexually-oriented or not, they didn't do as well as the Malcolm viewers when it came to ad recall.
When the researchers also looked at overall recall of sexy vs. non-sexy ads and found little difference between groups. One interesting finding: men had better recall of the sexy ads, women were better with the non-sexual. No surprise there, but before advertisers get too excited about continuing to use sexually-oriented ad techniques in trying to reach men: the men remembered the sexual advertisements, but not the brand being advertised.
Given that women do so much of the buying, maybe we'll see sex being downplayed, although that probably won't happen with products that are more explicitly marketed to men: beer and male grooming products.
An earlier study cited in The Economist article had already indicated that violent and sexually explicit TV shows detract people from noticing whatever ads were running, but had suggested that sex in advertising might be used to countermand this effect. Apparently not.
Anyway, an interesting study, and one that I'm sure that consumer marketers - and the few B2B hold-outs who continue to play the sex-sell game - will be paying attention to.
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My friend and colleague John Whiteside posted on this a while back on Opinionated Marketers, our joint blog. We never co-ordinate what we write about, and this was one of the few times that we collided on a topic. John got there first so a post that would have gone to Opinionated is belatedly finding a place on Pink Slip.
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