Marketing
Sex doesn't sell
Oct 28th 2004
From The Economist print edition
Old taboos are disappearing. Bad news for lazy advertisers
“HANDS up anyone here who doesn't masturbate.” No blushes were spared as London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) played host on October 25th to Slit, a new literary journal devoted to sex. That was part of ErotICA, an event that aimed to put “some of the finest pornographic minds together with artists and writers.”
At first sight, modesty seems a lost cause in Britain. Last week film-classification censors passed, uncut, the most explicit film in British cinema history: “9 Songs” by Michael Winterbottom, which consists largely of unsimulated sex scenes. A new glossy and supposedly upmarket sex magazine aimed at women, Scarlet, aims to fill the gap left by the recent demise of the Erotic Review. The number of licensed sex shops has tripled to 300 in the past decade. The latest to open, this week in Birmingham, is Hustler Hollywood. Run by Theresa Flynt, daughter of a leading American pornographer, it will be Britain's largest. The store will compete with Ann Summers, a firm whose sex-paraphernalia shops have multiplied from 40 to 117 in the past four years, and Boots, the nation's leading pharmacy chain, which now plans to start selling sex toys.
That's an interesting trend. But though life may be increasingly exciting for the sex-obsessed, in the wider population advertisers are finding that sex no longer sells the way it used to. “There's a lot less flesh flashed around in advertising,” says Claire Beale, editor of the trade paper, Campaign. “We're in a much more subtle era,” says Nicola Mendelsohn of Grey London, an agency owned by WPP, a communications conglomerate. “People are looking for things that are more real, more wholesome, more pure.” “Using sex to sell has been overdone and has reached saturation point,” says Paul Gostick of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).
Even agencies that specialise in striking sexual themes, such as TBWA, which invented the controversial FCUK logo for French Connection, a clothing brand, agree. “There has been a shift. We went through an era where sex was a means of shocking consumers, and that doesn't work any longer,” says Andrew McGuinness, the agency's chief executive.
Commercial and academic research supports the thesis. Only 6% of consumers surveyed by the CIM said they were positively influenced by sexual images in advertising. D_Code, a study of young consumers by HeadlightVision, another bit of WPP, concluded that they found sexually explicit advertising boring and repellent. Allison O'Keefe Wright, the report's editor, blames desensitisation. “In the past a brand could use sexual imagery to grab a young person's attention, now it's just part of the background. Subtle cues and suggestions are much more powerful.” Nostalgia, too is growing, stoked by fears of terrorism and war: “Playful, child-like imagery is having a lot of impact,” she says.
Women consumers are the most likely to be turned off by the cheesy and the explicit. Ms Mendelsohn's ad for a specialist shaving device for the female groin used a neutral silhouette rather than overt sexual imagery, which would have been “the last thing they wanted”. That made the shaver the best-selling electrical product of the past 12 months, she says. The same campaign is now planned for America.
Peter Frost, whose company, Proficiency2020, ran a conference last month (“Rethinking Pink”) on selling to women consumers, argues that crude sexual images are both distasteful and increasingly irrelevant. “When you see an office copier with a girl draped over it, it titillates 10% of the customers and alienates the rest.” Moreover, he says, many male consumers also like their advertising humorous and informative. He plans similar conferences in America next year.
Advertisers used to the sex-soaked style of continental Europe are struggling to make the shift. So are some home-grown ones. EasyJet, a British budget airline, attracted ridicule for a poster it produced earlier this year featuring a bulging bikini top and the slogan “Discover weapons of mass distraction.” Even Mr McGuinness of TBWA, no stranger to controversy on questions of taste, terms it “crass”. It was also muddled, he says, as the airline was simultaneously marketing itself as a cheap alternative for business travellers
