Women's Perception of Sexual Appeal in Advertising

Advertisements are regularly floated in the media that exhibit sufficiently 'bold' messages, to make them stand out in the cluttered world of advertising. Sex being the most primitive instinct of human beings, it is being widely used for tantalizing sexual fantasies of the consumers. This study was conducted upon 60 female participants, age ranging from 20-60 yrs, with the aim to develop an understanding about their acceptance of use of sexual appeal in advertisements. For this purpose, 9 advertisements having varying degrees of sexual content, selected from a pool of 194 advertisements based on judgement of experts, were rated by the participants for sexual content and sexual appeal on 10 point equal interval scale. Data were analysed statistically using Mean, SD, t test and Pearson Product Moment Correlation. Findings show that even when consumers perceived variation in the extent of sexual contents of advertisements, their liking for those sexual contents did not vary accordingly. Implications of the findings were discussed.