Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [77]
And when it comes to shock value, the new kid on the block is the Los Angeles–based American Apparel. Its racy, slightly seedy advertisements featuring pouty, underaged models (many of whom are company employees) provocatively posed—often with their legs spread, and always in varying states of undress—have achieved their goal: generating controversy. Since 2005, when the company came under attack for degrading women, promoting pornography, and even encouraging rape, it is doing better than ever—with 151 stores in eleven different countries, sales were estimated at approximately $300 million in 2006.
But the question remains: Is it the sex that is selling or the controversy? Evidence points to the latter. Of course, sex, which is innately hardwired to our survival as a species, is powerful in and of itself, yet in many cases it is the attention that can be more effective than the suggestive content itself. And while sex and controversy are, at least in the world of advertising, inextricably linked, when it comes to what truly influences our behavior and gets us to buy, controversy can often be the more potent factor.
IF SEX DOESN’T always sell, what about beauty? Are ads, commercials, or product packages featuring supermodels and preternaturally attractive celebrities actually more effective than those featuring “real” people? Well, evidence suggests that just as sex hijacks our attention away from the crucial information in an advertisement, so, too, can extreme beauty or celebrity. According to an article in Ad Age magazine, The Gap’s use of famous people, including Lenny Kravitz and Joss Stone, in ads has been a resounding failure.12
Think about über-attractive product spokespeople like Nicole Kidman or George Clooney. We remember their pretty faces, but do we really remember the brand of perfume or make of watch they’re trying to sell? It’s kind of like a few years ago, when the British comedian John Cleese did a series of clever antismoking commercials that failed in the U.K. People loved them because they were so deft and funny, but viewers were so distracted by the humor—and Cleese’s strong presence—that the antismoking message took a backseat. Similarly, the English comedian Dawn French’s pitch for the Cable Association and the English actor Leonard Rossiter’s ads for the Italian vermouth Cinzano were, in my opinion, two more examples of how celebrities can overshadow what an ad is trying to communicate.13
A recent study at the University of Florida showed that women, in fact, are often turned off by extremely attractive models. Approximately 250 young women viewed an identical set of fashion magazine photos, which included celebrities such as Uma Thurman and Lindsay Lohan. They were then asked to place the models in six separate categories of beauty: sensual exotic, trendy, cute, girl next door, sex kitten, and classic feminine. But the results showed that the women collapsed those half-a-dozen categories into two much more general categories: sexy and wholesome. The women were next asked for their emotional responses to the images. According to the study, the more provocative and sexual the women rated the model’s expression and attire, the more bored or disinterested the women were by the ad. On the other hand, the more wholesome,