This post is in response to our Marketing fellow Alex Meisner’s Using Sex to Sell.

I do agree what the author said, that many advertisements are using sex to sell their products, in which women are portrayed as “things” of sexual desire. These ads are extremely unethically to me as well. At the end of the blog, the author leaves a question, “do we really need sex to sell?” From my perspective, everything happened with reasons. I am pretty sure that they know that it is unethical, nevertheless, why do companies use sex in advertising still? In my own opinion, sex is an effective selling tool, and that is one of the reasons why marketers keep using sex in the advertising in spite of the ethical issue. To some extent, the ads adopting sexual concept would bring higher profit to the company compared to using art or music in the ad.

A feature of sex in adverting is that the imagery used, such as that of a pretty woman, typically has no connection to the product being advertised (Sex in advertising, Wikipedia). Obviously, the image of sex used in advertising aims at attracting attention. Some people argue that a funny picture, an eye-catchy art or even just a creative caption can easily grab audience’s attention. Stepping further from just to grab audience’s attention at first sight, generating controversies probably is what the marketers want. As a result, to create the familiarity of the product. When an ad becomes controversial, it is easily to find that many people around you are talking about the ad, many comments or arguments about the ad in social media. When you finally realized that you are surrounding by the information about the product sold in that controversial ad, the product has been placed into your mind. In my point of view, also from a consumer perspective, people are likely to buy something they are familiar with or they’ve often heard of. And consumers are unlikely to take ad in to account when they are considering which product should they buy, while other factors, such as functions, are not that much different. Therefore, the sex in advertising may help generate more profit by instilling the image of the product to consumers.

To continue the topic on Nu Skin Enterprises in the last blog, this time, I would like to talk about the marketing techniques used in the promotion. Continuing the example of the case in China, Nu Skin Company in China gives training to their direct consumers – people who buy products directly from Nu Skin company and sell the products to others. One of the most important parts of training these sellers is to teach them how to promote and sell the products through social media. The promoting posts written by different sellers but are surprisingly almost the same. Basically, pictures of users’ BEFORE and AFTER (as shown in the picture at the bottom) and their good comments is a must in the post. And then, the sellers sometimes post some pictures showing that some movie stars or singers were buying or bought the Nu Skin products. According to the seven principles we learned in the marketing class, it is obvious that social valuation and authority principle are the main tools they used. Social valuation, people tend to follow the majority doing which eventually became social effects. If the majority says the product is good, then consumers tend to believe the product is good since most people are saying the same thing. Authority principle says that people tend to respect people who are better than them. Of course, these two are not the only techniques the sellers used in their promoting post. Other techniques are recognized as pseudoscience marketing techniques which may fool people to believe advertisements, such as the creation of “phantom” goal (extreme claims without evidence). Someone may say “so what” because he or she has never ever been fooled by these ads. But if we put ourselves in the shoes of most nowadays consumers, we can easily see how powerful these ads are and how useful these techniques are. Compared to the generations which our parents and grandparents are in, we will see that our generation are not as rational as theirs. We rarely think deeper before doing purchases. Therefore, we easily believe the exaggerated words in the ads.

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Nu Skin Enterprises is an American direct selling and multilevel marketing company which develops and sells personal care products and dietary supplements (“Nu Skin Enterprise”). Nu Skin was found 1984 and it has become extremely popular in recent years in many countries in particular to China, while the company claims that they never spend money on advertising. They use pyramid scheme to sell their products, that basically people (direct consumers) purchase products from the company and try to sell the products to the people (indirect consumers) they know, such as friends, classmates and relatives. Take the case in China as an example. From no one knows this brand, to one third of your friends are doing business with Nu Skin, personally, I feel like it is what happened overnight. And noticeably, most people who are selling Nu Skin product are around the age of 20, or say, Y generation. What amazed me is that they all have EXTREMELY GREAT passion. One of my friends, who has got involved with Nu Skin, believes that Nu Skin gives them an opportunity to do their own businesses, earn money and gives them a great way to the bright future. Obviously, it is the result of brainwashing. In my point of view, one of the reasons why the brainwashing works is that Nu Skin has noticed that nowadays people, especially Y generation, are more interested in earning quick bucks. Generally, Nu Skin is targeting the people who want to get benefits or value but not willing to pay that much effort. As what I mentioned above, there is no advertisement expense on Nu Skin. Personally, I think what they claim is true. From the people who are doing business with Nu Skin, I found that these direct consumers are always doing marketing or advertising for Nu Skin for free. Since they want to sell all the products they hold in hand and earn more extra benefits, they are engaged in selling. In order to sell those products, they may make exaggerated comments on the products to let their potential clients believe that the product has much more value than what it really is. Additionally, the reason why the pyramid scheme works is that now the whole world economics is in recession. It is hard to find an appropriate job which can meet both physical and mental need.