Does sex still sell?
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Equally, if your business is at a key stage of growth or increasing its public profile, do you want everyone to associate you with sex? One campaign Perls’ team formulated for Phones4U aimed to promote the mobile phone company’s search for the nation’s next top comic.
The 16-24 age group was targeted with a national roadshow encouraging young wannabe comics to get up and tell a joke. MC2 decided to run an ad campaign in a number of key publications, including the Daily Star, FHM, Zoo and Nuts.
“For that group, sex is very important,” he says. “If you’ve got something visual it gets attention.” Hooking it around telling the ‘sexiest’ joke, the agency used a top photographer and top model and was good to go.
The timing was wrong though, with John Caudwell’s company announcing a strategic review of the group. “Understandably, they didn’t want anything that could be seen to cheapen the brand and had to pull it.”
MC2 swallowed the costs and a learnt the lesson that taking in the bigger picture is critical. Use sex when the eyes of shareholders and/or customers are on you and any negative response could be amplified.
The same goes for fast growing companies that move up a tier. Another professional services business Perls came across in the North West got a reputation for using sexual imagery, sexual events, such as escort agency girls waitressing at its functions, and sexual innuendo in ads and cards.
By the time it was operating in the mid-tier rather than fighting for attention as a small firm its credibility had been shot to pieces and was associated with cheap, tacky promotions.
Do you want skeletons in your cupboard? “If you mis-read your target audience your position can become irrecoverable,” says Perls.
Not often considered sufficiently, it might not only be the outside world that takes offence. If a company’s advertising is overtly sexual it can lead to the employee questioning their relationship with the boss they thought they knew, warns Sandra Pilson, founder of PEOPeople, an outsourced human resources business.
“You’ve got to question the corporate social responsibility of a company and it could well result in sexual harassment and discrimination claims, for which there is no limit to compensation awards,” she says. “If somebody’s looking for a way out they’ve got an instant link to messages the company uses in the outside world.”
It may also damage your chances of recruiting talent. “Unless sex is being used to sell across all genders and divides it’s difficult to get away with on a human resources level,” adds Pilson.
To mitigate the risks, consult your human resources function. Another solution is to give staff a chance to view and feedback on a proposed campaign. Ask if they have any grievances or objections. Doing this strengthens your hand if a case is brought against you and gives you a good idea of how it’s likely to be received by the outside world.
“No team member should only see a campaign once it hits the public domain because they can be asked about it by an external audience and know nothing about it,” says Perls, who points out that if they’re embarassed by the content it could have implications for their home and social life too.
Inevitably then, there are those that steer clear of sex in all its forms. Terry Hogan, founder of New-car-discount.com, a £20m turnover online car selling business has actively avoided using sex, despite not being against its use in marketing per se.
“We don’t use sex, mainly because when I set the business up four years ago the motor trade was so discriminatory and I wanted to get away from that,” he explains. It’s a fact that women get charged more in dealerships and are generally forgotten buyers when it comes to advertising.
Hogan noted though that 52% of cars are registered in a woman’s name yet only 10% of his customers were women. He decided to pursue an untapped market by fixing prices and creating a search tool that bears in mind the needs of both genders, such as categorising cars on whether you could get a buggy in the boot. With three male directors – all experienced car salesmen – it took a female marketing consultant to provide a strong female perspective.
And the results have been impressive, directly adding £160,000 bottom line profit. “Since marketing directly to women and avoiding sex to sell we’ve doubled the percentage of women buying from us. By positively discriminating sales have gone up generally. Having said that we don’t want to put off men – they’re still our biggest market. I’d like to say it’s principle, but it’s purely business. We simply started to address women’s needs.”
He’s now going a step further, launching a new generalist website, www.motoring.co.uk, offering motoring news and celebrity. It won’t have a sales slant and once again the aim is to attract more women customers.
Halpern is another, that while proud of his business’ work has made a conscious decision not to publicise the more overt campaigns in its portfolio, such as a campaign for lads’ mag Zoo called The Breast Test, where those that received the email guessed the bra sizes of a range of covered breasts – the better they did the more attractive the final image of uncovered breasts.
“These were specific campaigns for a particular product and service,” he says. “While appropriate for the products and target markets in question, seen out of context they may appear in questionable taste and offensive.”
Ultimately, if you’ve got any doubts, don’t do it, concludes Blears.
“The unwritten golden rules are: Never use your clients’ money to knock the competition; Sell the products’ benefits, not its features; And if you use sex to ‘flag down’ potential consumers you’ve offended half your market and disappointed the rest – they think they’ll be getting more lust and titilation, not a sales story about odour absorbing shoe in-soles. In the process you also define your client as a marketing moron – and the sales proposition as vacuous and bankrupt.”
