The Impact of Sexualized Advertisements of Perfume Products On Consumers
In the 21st century marketing and advertisement methods always tend to lean on objectification of men and women, especially the perfume industries, to satisfy their commercial purpose. “Now, a new ad for Jacobs' fragrance Oh Lola!, starring 'Twilight' actress Dakota Fanning, has been pulled from the British markets after consumers complained that it was sexualizing a child”. The usage of unvarnished images to describe a perfume is rarely used on social media now, before perfumes were advertised more traditionally by using a flower in the ad for floral fragrances, deer for musk and so on. Social media markets perfume using nudity, stereotypical elegant female and masculine male.
On social media, specifically Instagram and Facebook, the usage famous influencers or celebrities to deliver their campaign message through their posts. Before social media existed sexualisation was still occurring on different other platforms music videos, video games, magazines, movies and sports programmes. Sexual branding works across different media platforms and with the help of social media it grew even more. The main issue with sexualizing ads on Instagram and Facebook is that it shows unrealistic body figures or objects that encourage teenagers to achieve the same body or buy the same object that was presented in the advert. Almost all the social media platforms nowadays allows the targeting of adverts to certain demographics that are collected from the platform’s users so that the ads that appears to the user is more effective.
The production, of sexual content, for example fragrance industry, is directed towards two main vulnerable audiences, the first is teenagers and the second is internet users, as moving from traditional media such as magazines, movies, music clips and video games to new media (social media) is one of the main reasons why sexualizing social media marketing is considered a mainstream and often used nowadays. “Ramirez found that 17% of advertisements on new cites and 23% on entertainment sites contained sexually oriented content”.
The first study that the author came across that had somewhat similarity to this research topic was about examining the social media influences and its different forms on gender and how it shapes the various factors with the use of media and advanced technology. As claimed by online a user can adopt a whole different persona who gets easily affected by what it encounters while scrolling through the various applications; this study was based on Euro-American context which is highly influential on the internet. Having extra sexualized ads leads to users to be discourged about what they have as these ads usually present an unnatural and unrealtic body types, hairstyles and not many people afford what the ad shows of clothes, cars or mansions; therefore it motivates the viewer to look up to these sort of externalties as what is “Normal”.
Researching the social media marketing methods is vital as it has a huge impact on social media users, being exposed to Instagram and Facebook creates self-objectification among individuals and sets unrealistic goals for adolescents. The importance is to investigate the influence of the sexualized advertisements of perfume products on people, whether it changes or does not change the association a consumer has with the brand.
