Flora Zhu's Blog

In response to Jerry’s Xu blog post:” Does sex really sell? (Ethical issue for COMM296)” It was quite fascinating to see how companies use sex as an effective tool to sell their products. This got me to consider, how long has ‘sex’ been the main theme of the advertisements?

Presence of sex have been recoded in advertising since the early 1800s on trading cards. Erotic images were often used for Woodbury’s soap advertisements in the 1900 century.

(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/advertising_and_society_review/v012/12.2.o-barr.html)

In 1930 Woodbury entered a new level of sensuality with the usage of a completely nude model on their catalogs. Jovan also jumped on the ‘sex sells bandwagon’ by adding sex appeal to their advertisements. After the additional of the sensual content, Jovan recorded a sale increase of $1.5 million to $77 million between 1971 to 1978, thus providing evidence behind the effectiveness of the sexual content and the effect it has on sales revenue. The usage of sex in media and marketing has been around for a decade and has evolved from slight hints to more expressive and exaggerate displays as shown by the Calvin Klein ads. However, it it definite that the presence of sex has been around on the marketing field for quite some time. Regardless the $1 billion increase revenue from the modern CK ads, and the increase of $77 million for 1970s ad,  both supports the theory that sex really does sell regardless of time in history, and has been used as an effective sales tool.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/advertising_and_society_review/v012/12.2.o-barr.html

http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/book_excerpts/data/2476