The old adage ‘Sex Sells’ is as true today as it was when first mooted by Ad men back in the 1950’s.
The advertising medium and technologies used may have changed but the market place is still driven by people and their desires, and those desires haven’t changed in millennia – and I doubt they’ll be changing any time soon.
So, a predictable future… that’s got to present a good business opportunity, hasn’t it?
Absolutely! From a marketing standpoint, if we can be assured that ‘sex sells’ then all we need to do is assimilate our product with something sexy and voilà, your product will sell.
This ‘sex sells’ attitude may be fine and dandy for some products and market places but what if your product is ‘high brow’ and aimed at the ‘discerning customer’ or is of a ‘serious nature’, won’t a bit of pornography or smut cheapen the product and your brand and will it not loose you more sales than you would otherwise have made?
Probably yes to all of the above.
So, how does one then go about using pornography to promote those types of product or businesses?
Well for a start you can forget the imagery used above, that’s way to blatant and ‘in-your-face’. That type of ‘sex sells’ advertising is designed for the visual medium of billboards, magazines and cinema. It’s extremely effective but in the new cyber medium of The Internet, you need to give it a little twist.
Let me give you an example – Potato Salad. You’re trying to sell potato salad over the internet and want to use a bit of pornography to shift a few barrels of the stuff. You DON’T take a photograph of a naked woman with potato salad splashed all over her but you DO use a photograph of a real bowel of potato salad BUT rename it ‘naked-woman-in-potato-salad’.
The trick here is the internet doesn’t ‘see’, it only ‘reads’. So you write dirty and write pornographic but visually you remain ‘clean and above board’. Using the words ‘sexy-potato-salad’ has a similar effect… The words conjure up images which satisfy our desires but without actually providing those images.
The end result here is you do not offend your original market segment (because they are none the wiser to the suggested imagery) but you do attract another segment of the market (those hoping to satisfy their lusty desires) to your potato salad.
This dual standard of writing one thing and displaying another is then implemented throughout your business website, in the code, in the file names and in the imagery (photos and graphics).
The results are self evident. I have many an article indexed by the search engines and a quick study of the visitor statistics (Google Analytics) shows that those articles employing this dual pornographic mechanism can have as much as 4 times the success of other more important reads that are without this pornographic mechanism!
In fact, the mere fact you are reading this article is proof that pornography promotes your business!