Can sex sell to women?

It's a question I've always wanted to know the answer to, but never really gave it much thought. One day, inspired, and remembering that oft quoted mantra - "Google is your friend" I decided to turn to 'my friend' and find out the answer.

The first article I came across was this Science Daily post :
"Women Find Sexually Explicit Ads Unappealing -- Unless Price Is Right".

Ignoring the deliberately provocative headline, I delved deeper and found that the article was in effect reporting the findings from a study of women's attitude towards sex in advertising and it drew the conclusion that women are turned off when advertisers uses sex to sell a product but they are more inclined to have positive views of the product if sex is used to sell a high value product. In other words women see sex as something of value and thus are more likely to associate sex with expensive products, e.g bags, perfume etc, etc.

Christmas is the time of year where we see more adverts for high-value items and I thought this is a great time to see if these findings are reflected in the content of adverts targeted at women. Now, bearing in mind I don't watch TV very much, it meant actually watching a programme live to test this theory out. It would appear many advertisers have taken heed and almost all the adverts where sex was used to sell, were for high value items such as perfume, watches and unsurprisingly cars.

So, there you have it, sex can be used to sell to women, but only if the product is expensive.