2) The Scope In Advertising Industry

The highly sexual art of selling perfume

"Perfume is subjective". What's heavy to one is light to another, what’s delightfully sweet to one can be excessively sweet to another. All these were probably because we have not truly agreed on which terms to apply. So, we have a codified language to describe scents, which is the term ‘Fragrance’. As far as I am concerned, the term fragrance signified beauty of a person through scent, it designated as a person’s image, reputation and their sense of belonging. However I believed that perfume does not mean just a scent, it is something that media has connected with lifestyle, love and sex, and towards the personality of a person. Besides that, I think fragrance can help people in creating personal trademark. Verma (2009) stated that advertising is a tool for marketing the goods and services to consumers. 

It is strange when selling perfume requires great deal of TV and print advertising when the audiences cannot even smell it in either case. According to Nielsen (2007), nowadays consumers strived to have good looks and willing to invest for that, perfume is one of the cosmetic products. This is completely strategic and every successful perfume campaign give rise to a successful fragrance.

In this article, it was about Madonna’s first fragrance called ‘Truth or Dare’ that brought up an issue concerning the intention of advertising perfumes through sexual images. Ad Week contributor Robert Klara argued that, ‘marketers have lost the whole meaning of why [people] wear fragrances and moved away from reality in fragrance ads. Today, cologne is positioned solely around beautiful, young people—and you only sell it with sex.” This reflects to the incomprehension of rights in feminism.

Reichert (2003) declares that the fragrance ads that involved sexual images contained attention-getting headlines relying on double entendre, references to sex, and explicit promises. Nevertheless, according to Blair, Stephenson, Hill & Green (2006), they claimed that the tendency for audiences to remember an advertisement is greater when it included elements that is sexy in nature compared to those that have not.

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References:

Blair, JD, Stephenson, JD, Hill, KL & Green, JS 2006, ‘Ethics in Advertising: Sex Sells, But Should It?’ ProQuest, Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues, vol. 9, viewed 5 June 2012, <http://search.proquest.com.ezlibproxy.unisa.edu.au/docview/216235041>.

Reichert, T 2003, The Erotic History of Advertising, viewed on 7th June 2012, <http://books.google.com.my/books?id=1OPtAAAAMAAJ&dq=Brand+Team+Leader+Durex&ie=ISO-8859-1&source=gbs_gdata&redir_esc=y>.