Consumer Responses to Explicit Sexual Stimuli in Advertising: Artistic vs Provocative Style
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study extends prior research on sexual appeal advertising by developing a model of consumer responses to explicit sexual stimuli conveyed through different expressive styles (artistic versus provocative). A between-subjects experimental design (N=369) was conducted. The theoretical model includes ad-, brand- and behaviour-related variables. Structural equation modelling was used to estimate the hypothesized relationships.Findings reveal that the use of an artistic format stimulates a better response than the use of images in merely provocative poses. From a female consumer perspective, all paths were positive and significant when exposed to the artistic nudity stimuli, with the only exception of the positive emotions-purchase intention relationship. Results suggest a moderating role of the mode of representing sexual images on attitude-intention relationships. From a male consumer perspective, the response was similar, but any effect was present between attitude towards the advertisement and purchase intention. Support was found for a moderating influence of expressive styles on positive emotion-attitude towards the brand relationship.The paper sheds new lights on the way explicit sexual stimuli can be represented, offering a contribution to improving the communication effectiveness of products and brands that exploit sexual stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".