Deze poster viel mij op deze week. Hoewel ik, als filmmaker, snap dat je met een product een levenswijze verkoopt, was mijn eerste gevoel bij deze poster toch dat de focus compleet verkeerd lag.
Ik wil hier ook verder geen argument tegen het principe ‘sex sells’ geven, maar waar jeans juist kunnen opvallen, door interessante kleuring, pasvorm of wisselwerking met het model, worden ze in dit geval gewoonweg overruled door de complete focus op het verkrijgen van zo’n mooie vriendin of vriend, als je deze jeans draagt. Daarnaast heeft Gaudi ook nog het lef het logo zelf over de jeans te plaatsen.
Wat is jouw visie?
My take on this is twofold;
1) Sex simply sells. If you’re a man you want to *be* the young and strong guy on the poster and you want to *have* the young and sexy girl – and for women it’s the other way around (assuming heterosexuality etc). The advert implies that if you buy the advertised stuf this dream might come true. It’s weird but our easily influenced brains go for this every time.
2) Fashion is an odd product. Today’s jeans are not much better than the ones sold last year, or even ten or twenty years ago – and usually not much better then the competitions. In that respect it’s just like washing powder. So when, as a marketeer, you have not option of being able to say “this product is better than it was before” and/or “this product is better than our competition’s” what do you do? You turn to what I (as a marketing layman) would call something like “lifestyle selling”. You don’t sell the product, you have your advertising create a feeling of “I want to be like/with that person”, make sure the product in question is somehow connected to the lifestyle being portrayed.
Apple is a great example of this. In very, very few of their advertisements their actual products are being talked about. No processor speeds, amounts of memory are named. Sometimes not even what you can do with the product. No, the advertisements are designed to create a feeling, a desire to become part of a group – a very basic human emotion. And of course, every one wants to be part of one group: young, healthy attractive people.
And so, in advertisements of whatever kind, young, healthy, happy, perfect-looking people (made even younger and more perfect-looking by whatever means available) emitting sexual signals are selling us stuff, instead of the normal people most of us are. The product doesn’t have to be in the image or being named to be imprinted in our brain. Being the sex-driven species that we are, we go for this. Our brain doesn’t stand a chance.
In short, sex sells.
(As an aside, I think fashion is largely mass hysteria, carefully controlled by the fashion industry, invented to sell clothes to people who actually don’t need it. We’re such a childish species in many ways…)
I know they are selling a lifestyle, as it is is a great way to sell a product. Axe does this all the time. They don’t sell the actual smell, but the fact you will get massive amounts of girls when you use it.
Here however I found they really pressed the actual product to the background in a way I’ve hardly seen before. Of course your argument of not actually improving the jeans and therefor having no actual use of showing them proves a valid point for Gaudi’s choice.
Thanks for the insights!
Het klopt wel dat je tegenwoordig geen producten meer verkoopt, maar gevoelens, waarden, levensstijlen, verhalen en ideeën. Dat komt een beetje omdat wij zo overspoeld worden met dezelfde producten. Kijk maar in de supermarkt, H&M of de MediaMarkt. Allemaal dezelfde type producten, waar ik, als consument, geen verschil in zie.
Dan komt de marketing om de hoek kijken. We weten allemaal wel hoe een spijkerbroek eruit ziet, maar we willen er een die een vriend(in) oplevert, of iets anders waar we (relatief) gelukkig van worden.
Dus ja: sex sells!