Sex in advertising: perspectives on the erotic appeal

Abstract

* SEX in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal. Tom Reichert and Jacqueline Lambiase, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.294 pp. $65 hbk. $29.95 pbk. Reichert and Lambiase have assembled a collection that offers a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding the broad issues of sex in advertising and marketing, arguing that while sexuality may be prevalent in the contemporary communication marketplace, research seeking to bolster understandings of if and how it affects marketers' interactions with consumers and the culture is not. This text seeks to address that scarcity through this diverse overview of the research that has been done and suggestions of areas for further research and theory development book is divided into four sections dealing with research approaches, consumer responses, cultural impacts, and advertising audiences and contexts. In particular, Part I offers a valuable review of the consumer-behavior, social-science, historical, and psychological research analyzing sex in advertising. Chapters in Part II offer excellent models of the types of research approaches to studying consumer interactions with sexually laden advertisements. LaTour and Henthorne's review of their research dealing with arousal and brand awareness, Nudity and Sexual Appeals: Understanding the Arousal Process and Advertising Response, and Lang, Wise, Lee, and Cai's details of their experimental research involving sexual images on billboard advertising, The Effects of Sexual Appeals on Physiological, Cognitive, Emotional, and Attitudinal Responses for Product and Alcohol Billboard Advertising, would be most useful for advanced undergraduate or graduate students who are seeking methodological models of empirical research as well as information on sex-related advertising. Other chapters offer interesting examples of more qualitative approaches; for example, see Gould's work with advertising lovemaps, Toward A Theory of Advertising Lovemaps in Marketing Communications, and Schroeder and Borgerson's critical and cultural-studies analysis of the fetishism present in the Absolut Vodka campaign, Dark Desires: Fetishism, Ontology, and Representation in Contemporary Advertising. book's primary strength lies in its inclusiveness. Readers of the text will be reminded that research involving sex and advertising may involve far more than a content analysis of female body displays or textual innuendos in magazine spreads or TV commercials. Apart from the varieties of methodological approaches noted above, the book includes overviews of issues of advertising and sexuality that study the presentation of males as well as females and heterosexuality and homosexuality. Traditional and emerging media of advertising and marketing, such as online and Internet advertising, are addressed. …