Butter, perfume and music: Sex doesn't always sell

Taylor Swift

Carol Forsloff — It’s a common belief that sex sells, but the experts don’t think so, at least if one wants consistent and positive response over time from anything from music to butter.

According to behavior experts, overt sex revealed too frequently can be a turnoff. People begin to wonder about motivation and see it as driven by less talent concerns than the desire for attention. The problem is the attention is short-lived.

An Iowa study found that people are likely more able to remember the advertising in advertisements when they are not surrounded by sex or violence. Many experts observe that the notion sex sells is a false one. In fact less is more is the dictum for “selling”. In other words, more modest, sexually-oriented material has more lasting appeal, and actually sells more products or services, than the overt, more blatant types.

Psychologists say this: “Sexually graphic, intensely violent television programs are selling only one thing: the message of excessive violence and sex.

It is a coarsening and degrading message. It is a message of hostility and misogyny. And it doesn't even work!”

Journal of Consumer Research, presented research by Janne van Doorn and Diederik A. Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands that also concluded that too much sex has the reverse effect on sales, with folks less likely to have long term interest or memory of the product being sold.

Scientific research has also demonstrated that women do not respond favorably to flashy magazine advertisements with sexy women.  A University of Florida research study of 100 women of college age found that after being shown a number of advertisements with flashy, seductive photos, the young women expressed boredom and disinterest. Researchers concluded that male marketers miss the mark when putting out very seductive photos for advertising, with respect to how women feel.  Women tend to gravitate to an attractive woman, like Katie Homes, or in music someone like Taylor Swift, both of whom have that down-home, prettiness as opposed to the overtly sexy model from a Victoria Secret Ad.

So the next time you want to sell perfume, butter or music, it’s best to know what the facts are with respect to sex and advertising and getting the effect you want. The best approach is that less is more, substantiated not just by science, but the old adage we once learned as well, especially women, not to show it all and expect respect — or sales.

Modern music and the new historians

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Today's music is the folk music of tomorrow.  This means the best will be preserved, even as other music that is meant for a short turn dissolves with time.  Some tunes, however, are done so well they are remade again, not just because of their copyright-free status because of their age but the message rendered that is eternal.

Folk music is no longer the popular genre as it was in the 1960's, but there are folks who in looking for their personal roots find that the old music supports it.  Music tells of the times in which it was written.  Music was used, and still is, to record history.  In that sense, the musician one passes on that street corner in a city somewhere in the world may be doing something that will last for centuries, when elements of the new technology has long faded.

The musicians of great reknown know this, as Elvis Presley recorded not just the modern rock and roll songs with which we are familiar but the old-time music as well, including "Old Shep" and the gospel songs that were part of his personal roots.  Bruce Springsteen is another of the relatively new artists of today who looks for certain types of root music to perform, then gives it that modern twist or two that identifies it is his personal sound.

Many songs, when they have been rearranged, change so significantly that the meaning of the author has been lost.  The song  "Letter Edged in Black" became known by the country artists of the 1950's through Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, but its different theme in modern lyrics took away from the writer's story of how family estrangement can cause pain for generations.  This is an eternal message, even as the war protest words were that were later written to the melody and known  in later years.  But the history of time and the idea that we continue to learn from our history only when we know it, and the messages it gives, is lost when too many of our original music is lost as well.

So for those looking for their ancestry and building scrapbooks to identify a family, include with it a scrap of music from that same time.  Look beyond the words of today in looking for the good of yesterday that we can all enjoy again.

When we speak of traditional values, traditional music needs to be included in that definition, so long as its meaning remains what identifies us all as a community of individuals with one thing in common---our humanity.

As for modern music, it too has a distinctive place in that it records the events of the day and in time will become roots music of future generations.  It shares, in that regard, those old melodies that remain because we care.  So those folks on Americas Got Talent may be looking for their dreams to be fulfilled, and we can look at them with new eyes when we recognize how valuable music becomes when time has passed from what we knew of simpler times.