Sex doesn’t necessarily sell‚ Wits study on shock advertising finds

Marketers go “to extreme measures and use shock advertising to attract consumers’ attention”‚ but it doesn’t seem to work.

That’s according to a paper‚ penned by Wits student Brandon Urwin and lecturer Marike Venter‚ which “explored the effectiveness of shock advertising on Generation Y (those born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) consumers”.

The paper‚ titled “Shock Advertising: Not So Shocking Anymore”‚ found the method “has become obsolete and marketers need to implement alternative ways of ‘breaking through the clutter’ ”.

Urwin and Venter’s research also “showed that consumers found sexual advertisements to be the most ineffective”.

For the study‚ they analysed three variables — “level of shock‚ norm violation and memory recall” — with five different types of shock – “impropriety‚ moral offensiveness‚ sexual references‚ disgusting images and religious taboos”.

“The findings indicated that the majority of respondents for each type of shock either did not remember anything about the brand or the product being advertised‚ but simply remembered the imagery‚” a Wits statement said.

“Therefore‚ the advertisement was unable to imprint the brand into the consumer‚ but the imagery instead overpowered the rest of the content.”