Sexual Entertainment
Our world – that is, the fashion/entertainment/entrepreneurship world - is saturated with sex. It’s not a secret that one of the most basic needs of humanity is also one of the most lucrative marketing tools in this bustling industry.Sex is used to sell everything from lingerie to cheeseburgers and it's usually pretty effective. Yet occasionally, it's good for us to stop and wonder if this is a really good thing and where it will eventually take us.http://youtu.be/F4JjxJK62E8Broadly speaking:Sexual marketing is a self-sustaining machine; where there's demand, supply will follow. Individuals featured in sexually driven content like advertisements, music videos and glamour magazines had to come from somewhere, as did the people that booked them, took the actual footage, and marketed the product. They are catering to us, the consumers, who go out and buy products made appealing by beautiful women with parted lips and gorgeous men with chiseled pecks.
The Dilemma:Marketing should be about more than just going for the explicit jugular. It should be about being creative, poignant and provoking on more than just one level. Solely relying on sex to sell products is cognitively lazy, even if it’s profitable. Don’t get us wrong; there is a lot of sex driven marketing that makes a lot of sense both in context and in presentation since not all sexually alluring content is “dirty”, but really, good portions of it is.Clever Sexual Marketing:
Take Dita Von Teese as an example. The woman’s job is to be sexy and evocative. Strip teasing is still a form of striping; calling it anything other is just a matter of semantics. Yet the surprising thing is that it’s not “dirty” when Dita does it. Instead it’s rather beautiful and elegant, which is perhaps the reason she is so successful. While there are plenty of pictures of her playing the ultimate seductress or femme fatale, most of us would agree that Dita also comes off as remarkably poised and classy in real life.
Her off-stage presence - which tends to be dignified and demure - earns her so much respect that it’s hard to think of her as indecent. And that is exactly what Dita wants. Everything about her is carefully researched, conceptualized and executed to perfection allowing her to balance the two completely complimentary, but fundamentally different sides of her persona - the sex kitten and the sweet retro girl next door.Sex and the Usual Suspects:
Using sex for marketing is not wrong – per se. It’s how we do it and where we draw the line that makes for interesting conversation. Is it OK for someone in their late teens, or early 20’s and above to feel sexy and comfortable in their own skin? Of course it is, we are after all sexual beings! It's when when (young) men and women are presented as overly sexualized props in explicit settings just because that's the problem.When there is no cognitive stimulation, which is where erotica really differs from raw sex, marketing tends to get dirtier as the shock factor wears off. Sexual marketing just for the hell of it is in overdrive; blending primal instinct with intellectual stimulation is the real challenge of making it effective. So the bottom line is really this; if it will continue to flood the mainstream, it needs to be smart and worth our while.Image Source: Wiki Commons