Marketing Sex

Using sex as a marketing ploy is the oldest trick in the book, and one I won't spend too much time discussing. As consumers, we have become desensitized to the hyper sexual messages thrown at us everyday. Nothing really seems to shock us anymore, but since it's been proven that sex sells, marketers continue to successfully market products to us using sex, and sex continues to permeate our culture in every way.

The following ads speak for themselves. Both the McDonald's and the Burger King ad objectify women. They succeed by their intended "shock value."

(photo courtesy of blogspot.com)

As I previously mentioned, we seem to be shocked by less and less these days, but every once in a while, an ad comes along that pushes those boundaries. The result is something similar to this Burger King ad. Advertisers have to keep overstepping their boundaries more and more if their intended shock value is going to succeed.

(photo courtesy of entrepeneurgoddess.com)

In the spirit of "no press is bad press," even if an ad like this gets pulled early on because it is too outrageous, it can still be a success. The more people that are talking about it, the more successful the ad can become. In a lot of ways, scandal like that is better than the ad receiving no additional airplay.

Similar to the ad in the previous post that marketed "coolness," these ads perpetuate gender stereotypes. More specifically, a concept called "the gaze." Binary oppositions, like man/woman and masculine/feminine, help us to make sense of our world by knowing everybody's place. According to Practices of Looking, the famous philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued that, "all binary oppositions are encoded with values and concepts of power, superiority, and worth" (111).

How are women defined then, according to these ads?

As I stated earlier: they are objectified. They are made into submissive, passive, powerless objects. Men are strong and women are weak. Men are powerful and women are not.

If this seems old fashioned or sounds like a patriarchy to you, why do you allow these norms to perpetuate by continuing your role in these consumer societies? Probably because you never even realized that all of this was going on. It's amazing (and frightening) what a good marketing rep can do.