Sex-Oriented Advertising and its Impact on Attitude of Teenagers: Application of Behaviuoral Intention Model across Product Categories

Use of Sex in advertising continues despite the public outcry against it. Exposing mature adults to sex based advertising often invites lesser criticism compared to advertising that targets teenagers. Its use in advertising is no more confined to adult programs on television or adult literature; its consequences are far reaching in the context of exposure through mass media. Although some level of sex content might help in selling, the real questions are: how much sex content is appropriate; when is the use of such content appropriate, and for which target audience. The present research aims to explore some of these questions through consumer data in which teenagers are shown a series of print and television advertisements with different degree of sex content for different product categories. This paper attempts to find out the effectiveness of sex based advertising on the overall attitude and behavioural intention of respondents by application of Fishbien Behavioural Intention Model. The paper tries to find out the relationship between the use of sex content in advertisements for commercial and non-commercial product category at different levels of depiction and behavioural intention towards product categories. The results show that the respondents find sex-content based advertisement to be in bad taste in the context of family setting and there is a relatively moderating effect on the behavioural intention of consumers upon exposure to commercial product advertisements.