‘Sex Sells’. Really? In the Twenty-First Century?

Debbie Hickman
Nov 2 · 6 min read
photo from Bell and Howell archive

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but ‘sex sells’ feels like an old-fashioned notion, a thing that belongs at the bottom of the enormous (and still growing) crap-heap of outmoded seventies relics along with pervy TV presenters, racist comedians and crass sitcoms. Gone — thank the Lord — are the days of pouting females in dental floss swimwear draped over car bonnets or writhing about on shag pile carpets, at least in mainstream, regulated marketing. I’m glad about that on many levels; not least because it means I didn’t spend my mid- teens-to-late-thirties fighting for equality in the workplace and promoting feminist principles for nothing.

photo credit LA Times.com

Then again, it depends on our interpretation of the term. Are we just talking about ‘sex’ in its biological or biblical sense? These days the term ‘sexy’ gets applied to anything which has mass-appeal, that is perceived to be on-trend and of our time. It’s bandied around in boardrooms when decisions are being made about whether to run with a new product or offer. I’ve used it myself: ‘we can’t just call it Farm Apple Juice, that’s not sexy at all’ I informed my co-directors when designing a soft drink that would appeal to the young and cool, and to be stocked — and, we hoped, sold — in humongous quantities through trendy bars and cafes (for the record we called it Uber Juice, which did great until a certain taxi company got underway and the name got somewhat diluted — no pun intended).

Twenty or so years ago the ‘sexiness’ we applied to sell our products in the food industry was ‘organic’. Ten years or so later we swapped to ‘locally-produced — fewer food miles!’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘slow-food’. Today the buzz words are ‘craft’ and ‘artisan’. Generally though, if the ads in my social media feeds are anything to go by, the ‘sexiest’ concept these days is comfort and cosiness — or hygge, to give it it’s Scandinavian moniker (‘hygge’, pronounced ‘hue-ger’; derived from an old Norse or Danish word that means to give joy or comfort).

photo credit Google Images

Take chocolate for example. Cadbury’s adverts for Chocolate Flakes in the seventies and eighties featured beautiful young women sucking suggestively on a stick of chocolate in the bath, or backlit and helpless-looking sat cross-legged in a meadow. Now it’s an — albeit still beautiful and flashing a bit of skin, but no doubt heavily airbrushed — woman in a chunky knit and thick socks, snuggled cosily on a chair in front of a roaring fire reading a good book, in a lamplit room in a remote cottage atop a windswept cliff, who pauses to enjoy a ‘Lindt moment’.

photo credit 2amfilms.co.uk for Lindt

A good book, a warm room and good chocolate, maybe a cat or a dog. No sign of any black-spandex-clad spiv scaling the cliff face, brandishing a cardboard box of brown, soapy-tasting lumps that he picked up earlier in Asda for two quid in the assumption it would get him his leg over when he’s done saving the world. Nope, she seems happy as she is, thank you very much.

So we’re still peddling goods suggestively, but a healthier, safer and more wholesome version as opposed to the sleazy, grubby, misogynistic variety favoured by ad makers and marketeers of the mid-to-late twentieth century. These days we use our collective voices to demand that no-one is hurt, alienated, violated, objectified or made to feel inadequate by any of it and — should there be a whiff of anything untoward — we name and shame on social media and vote with our feet.

Ads for deodorant used to be all about straight, white people being fragrant (or not looking sweaty) while trying to impress the opposite sex.

photo credit flashback.com

These days they’re about celebrating diversity in gender and body type, female empowerment, and sticking two fingers up to convention and stifling relationships. Hallelujah.

photo credit: advertisingarchives.com/Dove

Of course there are still brands that rely on suggestive images to sell their product(for instance Jean-Paul Gaultier, Hugo Boss, Davidoff — though the former does exploit the male form as much as the female).

photo credit thefragranceshop.com

But do sexualised images really help sell more stuff? According to global market research organisation Imarc, the perfume industry in 2018 was worth around thirty-nine billion dollars, so someone is buying it. But the top-selling men’s cologne of all time listed by thetrendspotter.net website is Polo by Ralph Lauren, which has been around for decades, and relies mostly upon sales from repeat customers. Jean-Paul Gaulthier fragrances didn’t make their top ten, so either it really doesn’t smell that good or maybe we’re actually put off by the bottle shape.

In fact, to convince retailers to give their products shelf-space brand managers have to prove they’ve put money behind point-of-sale and major advertising campaigns, so it’s really the buying teams, not us, the end-consumers, that they’re trying to seduce. Very few people would buy a fragrance for the first time without sniff-testing it first, no matter how suggestive the packaging or nicely shot the adverts are.

Of course, the buying public has a lot more influence now we have so much more to choose from (pre-Brexit anyway). Going back to the chocolate example, in the seventies - the heyday of sexist advertising - the only options were Mars, Cadbury or Rowntree Mackintosh. We may have harrumphed and tutted at the flake ads but we still bought them because, at the end of the day, they tasted great and Green and Blacks didn’t exist. Whether your household favoured Quality Street over Roses at Christmas was down to who liked what in the tin, and not because your mother had a fondness for dressing up in a crinoline and taking a promenade with a toffish chap in a top hat.

So yes, ‘sex sells’ and always will, but these days we want it our way, whatever that may be as long as it’s consensual and inclusive, wrapped in compostible packaging, with a penchant for wearing slipper sox in front of a crackling bio-fuel stove, and not to have travelled 8,000 miles to get to us. As a customer base we’re informed and discerning, and have more than enough goods to choose from. We know a scam when we see one. We won’t put up with objectification or exploitation, nor do we need such nonsense to decide what to spend our hard-earned on. Frankly, we never did.

Seller beware.

Additional sources:

https://www.mintel.com/category/blog/personal-care-market-news

https://www.imarcgroup.com/global-perfume-market

https://www.thetrendspotter.net

Clippings Autumn 2019

Writing from Creative and Professional Writing students (PP1) at CCCU, 2019

Debbie Hickman

Written by

Mature student — extra vintage - of creative and professional writing at CCCU, trying to find the plot my family and friends think I’ve lost.

Clippings Autumn 2019

Writing from Creative and Professional Writing students (PP1) at CCCU, 2019

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