Begin obviously: Sex sells!
Yet, within the obvious, eternal, and ubiquitous, "Sex Sells!", lurks nuance: Unless It Offends Women, Then It Doesn't.
We've all seen those ads that feature voluptuous, ripe, shimmering sex wrapped sensuously around . . . a knife or a broken mirror or the slobbering toothy bite of a Doberman Pincher. Lean, long, curvy, hard, gorgeous boys and girls slithering, writhing, entwining; sliding through honey, sweat, wine, oils in frankincense; all inveigling: Take me now . . . and buy this, too.
For men, it's all good. And make it raw, explicit, and vulgar - all the better. For women, it is often gratuitous, pandering, absurd. Sure, everyone is pretty and the picture is great, but, ewwww.
So, how do you use explicit sex in advertising and make the sale to women? Advertisers want to answer this question because sex is such a powerful means for attracting attention, but if getting attention then offends half the viewers, we've got a problem, Houston. In a Journal of Consumer Research article, researchers Darren Dahl, Jaideep Sengupta, and Kathleen Vohs offer an interesting solution: Relationship commitment.
Dahl et. al. (that's kind of funny if you say it right and with no offense to Sengupta, Vohs, or Dahl!) manipulated high quality print ads that featured explicit sexuality by either including or excluding "relationship commitment" in or with the picture. The notion here is to frame the hot sex with a context - relational commitment - that many women find compelling. But, will that work? Does making hot sex into hot "committed" sex solve the problem?
Now, I'd like to show you the ads, but I can't. First, as a man, it's a bit dicey for me to be flashing nudie pictures in public - it's bound to offend somebody, including my wife! And, second, the researchers employed a set of proprietary images in the research and they cannot release them. So, we'll just have to use our imagination. And, isn't that better anyway?
Close your eyes and think about a high quality fashion photo of a man and a woman who fit your ideal of hot, bare, and sexual that is right on the edge of dirty, vulgar, and XXX. They like each other and they are both on top which means that they are consenting without dominance. Got that image?
Half of the people in the studies saw that standard image of a highly sexualized scene (but no dominance issues with snarling dogs, crawling females, or lurking shadows). It's the kind of image almost all men like, but that tends to annoy or offend most women - simultaneously magnetic and repellent.
The other half of people saw that same image, but now added to it is a beautiful expensive watch wrapped in a red bow with the caption: "This watch is positioned as a gift from a man to the special woman in his life."
Women seeing the explicit ad WITH the gift, reported a mean attitude score of 4.67 compared to 3.83 for woman seeing the same ad, but WITHOUT the gift. Now, these mean scores are almost impossible to understand unless you know statistical methods, but we can translate it into the Windowpane effect size. If you do the math that score difference between 4.67 versus 3.83 translates into a d effect size of .45, a "moderate" difference, or a Windowpane of 35/65. Moderate effects tend to be obvious to a trained eye and can be spotted without a lot of statistical whiz-bangery. In our Windowpane standard example of moderate effects, that 35/65 difference means almost twice as many people in the treatment group showed the effect compared to the control group. That's practical, functional, and realistic.
Thus, an advertiser can make a vulgar, explicit, sexual ad considerably more appealing to women in a simple way: Add to the sex a sign of relationship commitment. Make the commitment obvious, right there in the ad. And, women will like the ad more than if there was no commitment in the ad.
If you're thinking carefully about this, it might occur to you to ask whether the "watch-as-gift" is not a sign of commitment but rather a sign of "pay for play." He gives you an expensive watch and you give him guy-sex where you pretend to prefer words and deeds you do not prefer.
Being good persuasion scientists this research team also wanted to demonstrate the "commitment" effect another way to address such concerns. They used priming. Priming is a strategy of presenting information to make it more active in memory to affect how later information is received. For example, I could make you look more attractive by first showing pictures of unattractive people, then letting the viewers see or meet you. Alternatively, I could make you look less attractive by first showing pictures of highly attractive people, then letting the viewers see or meet you. Those first pictures "prime" or stimulate a particular pattern of thoughts and images that make later information seem different.
This persuasion team used priming in text to manipulate how women then perceived the sexy ads shown later. Women in the experiment were randomly assigned to read different stories about a man and a woman in a relationship. Here are two examples.
Prime Example 1: John and his girlfriend, Mary, have been together for two years. They are a young couple, with a lot going for them, including financial stability and great jobs. Furthermore, their friends all notice how completely devoted John is to Mary. John used to lead a bachelor lifestyle before he met Mary; but that has all changed now. Even when other women find him attractive and flirt with him, he has eyes only for his girlfriend. On weekends as well, he usually prefers to spend a large part of his time with her, rather than hanging out with his buddies. Also, Mary finds John to be very spontaneous and passionate. One of the attractive things about John is his uninhibited enjoyment of all life has to offer. John and Mary have enjoyed many good times together during their relationship. And when either of them is going through a rough time, they are always there for each other.
Now, the second story.
Prime Example 2: John and his girlfriend, Mary, have been together for two years. They are a young couple, with a lot going for them, including financial stability and great jobs. However, their friends all notice that John is not completely devoted to Mary. John used to lead a bachelor lifestyle before he met Mary; that has not totally changed. Even now, when other women find him attractive and flirt with him, he is inclined to stray. On weekends as well, he usually prefers to spend a large part of his time hanging out with his buddies, rather than with his girlfriend. However Mary finds John to be very spontaneous and passionate. One of the attractive things about John is his uninhibited enjoyment of all life has to offer. John and Mary have enjoyed many good times together during their relationship. But John isn't always there for Mary when she is going through a rough time.
Focus here. Women read just one of these stories, not both. The first clearly demonstrates a committed relationship between John and Mary, the second just as clearly demonstrates a much more fluid, fragmented, and fleeting relationship. Thus, some women are primed to think about relationships between men and women as "committed," while others are primed to think about relationships as "uncommitted."
All women were then exposed to the same explicitly sexual ad WITHOUT the gift and asked to express their attitude toward it. According to priming theory, women who read the "committed" prime for John and Mary should see the ad with a more favorable mindset, that men love women and are committed, faithful, and reliable relationship partners. Thus, these primed women should see the ad as, yeah, kinda vulgar, but within the loving bonds of a committed relationship. They should like the ad. By contrast, the women reading the "uncommitted" prime should have a negative mindset, that men are unfaithful, untrustworthy relationship rats and respond to the ad accordingly.
