SEC3_GROUP11

Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai
MARKET RESEARCH, SECTION III - GROUP 11
Does the use of SEX in advertising for unrelated products
(Unrelated to sex e.g. coffee) work?
Market Research Report submitted to Dr. Bharadhwaj
Name FT No
ANISHA KASHYAP FT163012
GUNJAN KAUR JABBAL FT163026
KINGSHUK CHAKRABORTY FT163042
NAVEEN KUMAR G FT163059
RAVI SHANKAR FT163077
SHUCHI SAXENA FT163091
YEDHU K P FT163105

Introduction
There is an increasing trend among the marketer community to use the sexual innuendos for
augmenting the sales. We can find the same in many unrelated products such as Amsutra Slice,
Deodorant Advertisements, V-Guard Stabilizers, Coffee, Cold drink and in many related products
such as AXE Boat Party, Wild stone Deodorant, and Engage Etc that also uses sex to promote their
product. Such advertisements are getting more blatant with every passing year. The rise of internet
over the last 20 years has produced a direct line for such stronger, graphic sexual material to enter
consumer’s home. With the advent of social media tools such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, this
trend is on a rise.
From a marketing view, sexuality can have biological, emotional/physical affect on the viewer. This
allows the viewer to develop a closer bound with the brand, therefore, stronger recognition. It’s
important to recognize the effect of these ads have on the mind of consumers. Is the contribution
only in terms of getting a buzz for the brand or sales are also getting affected? Is it going to affect
consumer behaviour? And if it affects how consumer perceive this publicity? It is evident that people
are getting more and more comfortable with this, does this change also reflects in the sales of these
products? If yes, then we need to find out the answer to what extent?
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to find out – ““does use of sex in advertising for unrelated
product work?”
Literature Review
Sex appeal in advertising is often considered as one of the effective tools for attracting consumer’s
attention and has become more and more important to some advertisers for the same reason.
Now let us here the comments from some renowned marketers:
Rebecca Howard in her article “Sex in Advertising: Does it sell? (Howard)” draws different opinions
of writers that the sensuality and imagery portrayed through the ad should be relevant to the
message it carries as well as the nature of the product.
According to Donna Rouner, a Colorado State University associate professor of Journalism and
Technical Communication, the success of advertising that uses sexual imagery often depends on the
product being sold. “Research has shown that people are pretty turned off by sex in ads if neither the
product nor the lifestyle (being portrayed) is relevant to nudity or sex.
Rouner says. “Where sex works for people generally is when the product itself has to do with sex or
intimacy or nudity".
All the above comments lead to one important question and that is "Does sex sell?" Actually, sex
does not sell, but sexiness does. Using sex appeals in advertising is a good way to target certain
market segments but not all. Although using sexual appeals in brand advertisements has not proven
to be as effective as needed, using them in social marketing may be beneficial. "From a social
marketing perspective, sexual appeals may be beneficial for the simple reason that they are

attention-getting and potentially motivating desirable message. However advertiser may take into
consideration the following points before using sex appeal as a tool in advertising:
• Adequate research should be made on consumer's interest, market's demand and the product
before making the advertisements.
• Appropriate and attractive models (male/female) should be chosen depending upon the target
audience.
• Study the cultural aspect of the targeted market or consumers for the effectiveness of the Ad.
For the many products that are not related to sex, using sex to sell them does not work. It can even
backfire. Many believe using sex to sell a product that is unrelated to sex is a gimmick that cheapens
both the image of the company and the product however showing sexiness works. Those that are
attracted to the ad for reasons unrelated to the product benefits tend to remember what attracted
them rather than the product. We cannot deny that sex and advertising are great bed partners, but
rather that explicit displays of salacity, adding teasers into the mix, spices up happenings for both
parties
Another thing to be wary about is the degree of nudity, that is sufficient to grab eyeballs and
according to prime time limits, what is too much thus perceived as affronting. For these reasons one
needs to be careful where and how to use sex in advertising.
So we are here to figure out “does use of sex in advertising for unrelated product work?” We did the
experiment taking three different types of advertisement for a product. i.e. bland, sensual and
sexual advertising. And for the matter of experiment, we considered two different products. One is
functional product and other is hedonic.
Dependent Variables PURCHASE INTENT
Independent Variables TYPE OF PRODUCT{functional, hedonic}
GENDER{MALE,FEMALE}
TYPE OF AD{BLAND,SENSUAL,SEXUAL}
Quantitative Analysis
The quantitative analysis for this particular study should be done in a controlled environment. This
requires setting up an experiment with different people for each type of advertisement (bland,
sensual and sexual) for each type of product (functional and hedonic). The advertisement selection
will be followed up by a set of questions to be answered which will measure the variables such as
purchase of intent. The functional product is basically considered as an essential commodity which
people consume as a need. Whereas hedonic product is considered as a non essential commodity
which people consume for pleasure.
To conduct this experiment, we choose two products i.e., CLICKON and FOCOBOLA which are
functional and hedonic respectively. And for each such product we have prepared three different
advertisements (bland, sensual and sexual elements) each for men and women respectively.

CLICKON (Functional Product for Men)
BLAND Adv SENSUAL Adv SEXUAL Adv
CLICKON (Functional Product for Women)
FOCOBOLA (Hedonic Product for Men)

FOCOBOLA (Hedonic Product for Women)
The questions listed below measures “PURCHASE INTENT”
1. I would like to buy products having attractive ads
2. When I intend to buy a utility product, I don't mind paying a premium
3. I am likely to buy the product being advertised.
4. I think this product is worth buying.
Variables
Independent Variable
1. Type of product (functional, hedonic)
2. Gender (male, female)
3. Type of Advertisement (bland, sensual, sexual)
Dependent Variable
1. Purchase intent
Purchase intent is a measure of the probability that a consumer will purchase a service or product.
Purchase intent is an important figure to monitor and measure in advertising / marketing because
brands want to spend money engaging and audience that is in the market for their product service
Hypothesis
H1: For hedonic products (unrelated to sex), use of sex in advertisement is positively related to
purchase intent.
H2: For functional products (unrelated to sex), use of sex in advertisement is positively related to
purchase intent.
H3: For female customers, use of sex in advertisement is positively related to purchase intent.
H4: For male customers, use of sex in advertisement is positively related to purchase intent.

Scales for Dependent and Independent variable
The “Likert Scale” is an ordinal psychometric measurement of attitudes, beliefs and opinions. In each
question, a statement is presented in which a respondent must indicate a degree of agreement or
disagreement in a multiple choice type format. The scale is balanced on both sides of a neutral
option, creating a less biased measurement. The actual scale labels, as well as the numeric scale,
may vary. Since, in our study, we have used variables that are categorical, the selection of the scales
for the dependent and independent variables was based on this. We selected Ordinal scale as it is
used for ranking, rating or grading and it shows highest to least preference. Under Ordinal scales we
chose Likert scale, it asks the respondents to indicate the level to which they agree or disagree with
belief statements about a given object.
For our experiment, we have used 5 point Likert scale namely Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither Agree
nor Disagree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree for simple and easy to understand for our respondents.
Choice of Method
When we need to market a product, we would like to know whether the product would be
acceptable in the target market. Experiment Design and Surveys are the two methods which can be
used to know the response for a product in market. Experiment Design is being used in our analysis
for the following reasons:
 Since the topic is a little sensitive, respondents tend to give politically responses.
 Since getting influenced by sex in an advertisement happens sub-consciously, asking direct
questions would not be the right approach to get such a response.
 Since there was a need to control all the other variables, but sexual content in an ad,
carrying out any other method would not have been appropriate.
Experiment Design was conducted where each respondent was shown three advertisements (bland,
sexual, and sensual) each for hedonic and functional product. They were measured on the questions
mentioned in the questionnaire section.
Questionnaire
1 I would like to buy products having attractive ads
2 When I intend to buy a utility product, I don't mind paying premium
3 I am likely to buy the product being advertised.
4 I think this product is worth buying.

SPSS RESULTS
1) CRONBACH ALPHA
Cronbach's alpha is the most common measure of internal consistency ("reliability"). It is most
commonly used when you have multiple Likert questions in a survey/questionnaire that form a scale
and you wish to determine if the scale is reliable.
We find the initial cronbach’s alpha to be .446 for the construct “Purchase Intent”. This construct is
measured by the four questions. With this we came to know that there is one culprit question in the
list which is dragging the croanbach’s alpha down to .446.
Upon our close suspicion, we found that the question no: 2(“When I intend to buy a utility product, I
don't mind paying premium”) is the reason behind obtaining such a low cronbach’s alpha. We
removed that question and re-ran the test in SPSS. And this time as expected, the obtained
cronbach’s alpha is .617 which is desirable measure to continue with further analysis.
2) Univariate Analysis of ANOVA
ANOVA compares two types of variances: the variance within each sample and the variance between
different samples. Significant difference between the samples can be identified using the p-value.
This would have indicated a significant difference between its population mean and the other
population means.
Our experiment requires Univariate Analysis of Anova.

Analyzing the between subject factors confirms the usage of data of 120 subjects is uniform across
Ad-Type, Functionality & Gender.

The Grand Mean of bland ads is more than sensual and sexual type ads. The subjects have given
higher preference to the ad that depicts hedonic product, across the 3 types of ads.
 Sexual Ads-
Female subjects have shown preference towards hedonic as well as functional
product ads as compared to that shown by male subjects.
 Sensual Ads-
Male subjects have shown more preference towards hedonic product ad as
compared to that shown by female subjects. Also both male and female subjects
have shown equal preference towards functional product ad.
 Bland Ads-
The data for this category presents interesting insight. For hedonic product ad male
subjects have shown higher preference than female subjects. Whereas for functional
product ad the situation is just the opposite, i.e., female subjects have shown higher
preference than male subjects.
Overall hedonic product ads dominate over the functional product ads across sexual, sensual and
bland type of ads.
Levene's test works by testing the null hypothesis that error variance of the dependent variable is
equal across groups. If the significance from this test is less than 0.05, then variances are significantly
different and parametric tests cannot be used. The significance reported is 0.191, which is greater
than threshold value of 0.05.

From test between subjects we get only functionality of product is highly significant (0.003). The
interaction effects along with other independent variables are not significant as evident from the
data in the table and can be ignored.
There was a significant effect of IV (functionality) on DV (purchase intent) at the p<.05 level for the
three conditions [F(1, 108) = 8.949, p = 0.003].
The estimated marginal means for ad type, functionality and gender point to the fact that the factors
are independent of each other, as their value tallies with value of means reported in descriptive
statistics table.
The Tukey’s HSD table concludes that differences in table of mean difference do not exceed HSD
critical difference.

Graph 1:
This Purchase Intent for Female subject graph shows an interaction effect between ad type and
functionality.
Female subjects have shown the greatest prefernce for sexual hedonic ads followed by sensual
hedonic ads. The preference shows a switch when it comes to bland ads. Female subjects have
shown the greatest preference for bland functinal ads.

Graph 2:
The graph depicts the purchase intent for male subjects. It shows a similar pattern across all ad types
for both hedonic as well as functional product ads with male subjects preferring hedonic product ads
over functional product ads.

Graph 3:
This graph depicts Purchase Intent for the entire subject population.
There is a very small variation in preference of ad types across hedonic product ads. But there is a
large variance in preference of ad types across functional product ads.
The interesting part here is that, the difference in the preference of hedonic and functional product
ads gradually narrows down across ad types(sexual to bland).

Graph 4:
There is a dual interaction effect visible here.
Across the 3 ad types, Male subjects prefer sensual ads the most and sexual ads the least.
Whereas, female subjects prefer Bland ads the most and sensual ads the least.

Graph 5:
This shows an interaction between Gender and Functionality.
Across genders, the preference for hedonic product ads is higher as compared to that of functional
product ads. The variation in male preferences is higher as compared to the variation in preferences
shown by female subjects.
RECOMMENDATION
From the study we can conclude that
a) Hedonic product ads are preferred over functional product ads across ad types and gender.
b) Female subjects prefer sexual ads for hedonic products and male subjects show preference
for sensual ads of hedonic products.
c) The preference across gender types for both the products types is largely for sensual ads.
Thus, we can say that “sex doesn’t sell but sexiness does.”

REFERENCES
1. M HULTIN: “Sex in advertising: how it influences young men and women”, 2013
2. NM MALAMUTH: “Research on sex in the media”, 2004
3. D Korn: “Ethical Judgments of Sexual Appeals in Advertising Image”,2006
4. AN Ifezue: “What Makes an Effective Advertising for a Man or a Woman”
5. http://chandiraj.blogspot.in/2010/05/sex-appeal-effective-tool-for.html
6. http://www.businessinsider.com/do-you-think-sex-sells-think-again-2012-4?IR=T
7. https://introspectmarketing.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/does-sex-in-advertising-sell/
8. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/23/sex-sells-ads-should-have-thought-
twice_n_4653226.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in
9. http://www.sify.com/movies/boxoffice.php?id=14487520&cid=20744
10. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/seduction-lust-sex-can-make-brand-sexy-derrick-rozdeba
11. http://bharatjhurani.com/2010/12/sex-sells/
12. http://hooklineandclincher.in/10-marketing-campaigns-valentines-day-2015-indian-brands-
cant-afford-miss/

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