Presenting women as sexual objects in marketing communications

Abstract

Purpose In the current information age, when the attention spans of most people have become very short, marketers are facings serious challenges to grab the attention of their target audience effectively and fruitfully. From street corner to bedroom, virtually every perceivable location of human traces are littered with activity of marketers, whether they are small or large in scale or the recipients of their information understand the message properly. Studying consumers’ acceptance of the main ethical issues in communication, mainly in advertising, has recently been receiving much attention from scholars. Therefore, to grab the attention of people in the increasing competitive environment, advertisers have resorted to using what they feel can quickly attract the audience. For example, the attachment of attractive women with their physical natural endowments presented in explicit sexually appealing postures to products/services that have no linkage with women. These practices have raised some moral and ethical questions within the society. Therefore, this study aims to focus on discussing marketing communication through presenting women as a sexual object from the morality, ethics and religious perspectives. Design/methodology/approach This is a descriptive study based on the systematic literature review. Initially, this paper discusses the ethical issues of using women and sexual appeals in the process of marketing communication, as well as the current level of practices in the industry. Then, it discusses the consequences and dimensions of the issues from different types of ethical grounds. Finally, it provides recommendations with the objective of finding a common ground from business and social perspectives. It also mentions the scopes of further research, which could lead the secular world to modify their moral values and come closer to the norms of other civilized societies. Findings The position of the paper takes is that considering the negative effects of the prevalent advertising in society, the practice falls short of human moral values; as a result, it is considered unethical. Originality/value This review paper examines the ethical implication of using women as marketing tools from the perspectives of morality, business and Islamic principles that will help business groups, as well as the whole religious community, especially Muslims.

Parental Controls Off in Google Play Store: Sexualisation of Female Characters in Video Game Advertisements

“…These 17 categories of video games are listed in alphabetical order as follows: Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board, Card, Casino, Casual, Educational, Music, Puzzle, Racing, Role Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, and Word. One of the ways to promote video games is through the use of advertisements, or ads in short as Gramazio et al (2021) placed it. Presently, many media critics have criticised that advertisements are increasingly sexualised (Alam et al, 2019;Burnay et al, 2018;Gramazio et al, 2021;Law et al, 2020;Oniku & Joaquim, 2021;Reichl et al, 2018;Skowronski et al, 2021). While there are many ways to advertise such as through the use of humour, emotions, and fears as appeals to customers (Law et al, 2020), using sex has become one of the most appealing ways to attract customers and it is now considered a culture in the consumer community (Alam et al, 2019;Oniku & Joaquim, 2021).…”

“…Presently, many media critics have criticised that advertisements are increasingly sexualised (Alam et al, 2019;Burnay et al, 2018;Gramazio et al, 2021;Law et al, 2020;Oniku & Joaquim, 2021;Reichl et al, 2018;Skowronski et al, 2021). While there are many ways to advertise such as through the use of humour, emotions, and fears as appeals to customers (Law et al, 2020), using sex has become one of the most appealing ways to attract customers and it is now considered a culture in the consumer community (Alam et al, 2019;Oniku & Joaquim, 2021). In video game advertisements, advertisers would sexually objectify women in such a way that the visuals highlight sexually suggestive actions and behaviours to upsell the products and further attract the consumers (Gramazio et al, 2021;Law et al, 2020;Oniku & Joaquim, 2021;Reichl et al, 2018).…”

“…Addressing the occurrence of sexualised video game advertisements, while there is a substantial amount of research conducted on sexualised advertisements (see Alam et al, 2019;Gramazio et al, 2021;Law et al, 2020;Oniku & Joaquim, 2021;Reichl et al, 2018;Slater et al, 2017;Tang et al, 2019) and sexualisation in video games (see Burnay et al, 2018;Driesmans et al, 2015;Karsay et al, 2018;Liu, 2018;Noël et al, 2021), there is yet research that has specifically looked into the video game advertisements that are available in smartphone applications. Further, no literature has looked into the video game advertisements from Google Play as the researchers have observed that several Google Play video game advertisements are sexually suggestive.…”

“…To the researchers' observation, video game industries have been advertising the games on social media platforms. While there remains no explicit literature on sexualised video game advertisements, the notion of "sex sells" as termed by Alam et al (2019) in the field of marketing and advertising does exist. Alam et al (2019) have further highlighted that most media today advertise products with sexualised content even though there is no logical relationship between the two.…”

“…While there remains no explicit literature on sexualised video game advertisements, the notion of "sex sells" as termed by Alam et al (2019) in the field of marketing and advertising does exist. Alam et al (2019) have further highlighted that most media today advertise products with sexualised content even though there is no logical relationship between the two. Law et al (2020) have highlighted that despite the sensitivity, sex remains a crucial element in marketing products through advertisements but unbeknownst to the public, the sexualised advertisement comes with several negative consequences.…”