Even the most conservative companies rely on sex to sell their products. It taps into one of our deepest human desires.
“The message of sex does grab people’s attention,” says Tom Reichert of the University of Georgia.
“As long as people desire to be attractive to others, as long as people desire romance and intimacy and love and all the wonderful feelings they involve,” he says, “advertisers can show how their products can help satisfy those needs and desires. Whether we like it or not, products play a role in society’s intimacy equation.”
But as it saturates the market, this means of selling products doesn’t always work. Just look at American Apparel and Abercrombie & Fitch, which have long relied on cheap sex dolls as a key selling point – and now they’re trying to set their brands apart.
When the clothing company made a billboard on a Houston street showing a woman wearing leggings and nothing else while bent over, people got angry.
The brand has been running raunchy campaigns since at least 1995, with a 2000 underwear ad topping the list. The ad showed a woman wearing underwear from the clothing line and nothing else.
But the A&F Quarterly was the most important. The quarterly, first released in the late 1990s, was filled with nudity and sex dolls. In 2003, thousands of Americans threatened to boycott the store, causing it to stop selling the catalog for a time.
In 2008, the quarterly magazine reappeared, but only in the European market. Tom Lennox, the brand’s vice president of corporate communications, said he thought the quarterly would appeal to “the British openness to culture and creativity.”
In 2009, for example, PETA wanted to run a pro-vegan ad campaign during the Super Bowl, showing models licking eggplant and pumpkin, among other things. But NBC disagreed, saying the ad “depicted a level of sexuality that exceeded our standards.”
In August 2011, the animal rights group pushed the envelope further, announcing it would launch a soft-core porn site, and its spokeswoman Ashley Bourne told the Herald Sun, “More of our actions are sometimes designed to get people to sit up and pay attention to the plight of animals.”
