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Building on institutional theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for analyzing how consumer attitudes toward nudity in ads change as a result of modernization. Modernization is driven by the currents of pluralism and rationalism. The authors highlight the inherent contradiction of these two pillars and how this contradiction results in an inverted-U pattern in the relationship between level of modernization and consumer attitudes toward sex appeals. Consumers’ sexual permissiveness and their perceived insufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content in the mass media are the individual-level mediators of the two pillars.

The data were collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. A total of 811 college students from the three cities participated in the study.

The relationship between level of modernization and attitude favorability followed an inverted-U pattern. Female participants in the most modernized city possessed significantly less favorable attitudes to the ads than their male counterparts. Female and male participants were similar in their attitudes in the less modern cities. Sexual permissiveness mediated the relationship between modernization and male participants’ attitudes, but not with female participants’ attitudes. Perceived sufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content mediated the relationship between modernization and their attitudes among both male and female participants.

The paper makes an empirical contribution by testing the hypotheses regarding consumers responses to sex-appeal advertising with data collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. Additionally, it offers an institutional perspective on social attitude changes. Social attitude change is of great interest to researchers, but a systematic theoretical analysis is currently lacking.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of increasing the intensity of sexual or violent content on consumer responses to online video advertisements, with a particular emphasis on sharing intentions.

The paper uses a between-subjects experimental design across two studies using new to the world online video advertisements as stimuli.

Study 1 finds that increasing the intensity of sexual and violent humor improves advertisement effectiveness amongst men but leads to significantly more negative attitudes toward the advertisement and brand amongst women. Study 2 identifies gender and humor type as moderators for sharing intentions in the presence of audience diversity. While men are more likely to publicly share sexual and violent humor advertisements, social anxiety mediates intentions to share sexual humor advertisements in the presence of greater audience diversity.

The paper offers insights to practitioners regarding the use of risqué forms of humor as part of a digital marketing strategy.

Drawing on and extending benign violation theory, the paper introduces and verifies a theoretical model for understanding consumer responses to the use of risqué forms of humor in online advertisements. It identifies how audience diversity affects sharing intentions for sexual and violent humor-based advertisements on social media.

In light of the recent shift in the US culture, this paper investigates the effectiveness of female sexual empowerment as ad appeal in the apparel industry.

Study 1 aimed to understand consumers' reactions to female sexual empowerment in ads in terms of their attitudes toward the ad, attitudes toward the brand and purchase intention. Study 2 investigated the role of gender in perceptions of female sexual empowerment in ads.

This research establishes that consumers display positive attitudes toward female sexual empowerment in the apparel advertisement. These attitudes positively influence attitudes toward the brand, which in turn improve purchase intention. These effects are stronger for women than men.

This research borrows from social power theory to reveal the impact of female sexual empowerment in ads in the apparel industry. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the findings also show that female sexual empowerment can have a positive impact on purchase intention through a serial mediation of attitude toward the ad and brand.

Marketers need to be aware of the impact of female sexual empowerment as ad appeal. Specifically, firms in the apparel industry could benefit from the positive effects of incorporating female sexual empowerment in their campaigns.

This research is the first to investigate the role of female sexual empowerment as ad appeal in improving consumers' responses to ads.

This paper aims to examine how exposure to sexual images activates the urge to yield to temptation in a subsequent unrelated context.

In Study 1, this paper uses empirical data based on an automobile expo to examine the correlational relationship between sexual imagery and indulgence. In Studies 2 and 3, this study examines the moderating effects of self-construal and gender differences on indulgent consumption, with different dependent measures. Study 4 distinguishes the sexual images into gratuitous sex and romantic love and tests the mediating role of sensation seeking.

For men, an independent self-construal increases indulgent consumption. In contrast, an interdependent self-construal facilitates women’s indulgent consumption. Having an interdependent self-construal has the opposite impact on indulgent consumption for the two genders: sexual images of romantic love attenuate the effect on men but boost the effect on women. Perceived sensation-seeking serves as the underlying mechanism.

This paper contributes to the literature on sex, reward-processing, context effects in marketing and indulgent consumption.

Advertisers, retailers, food courts and restaurants may use sexual imagery to promote more indulgent consumption with gender and self-construal as segmentation variables. Public policymakers and other concerned parties should also raise consumers’ awareness of the priming effect found in this research.

This research advances the literature on sex by demonstrating the priming effects of sexual imagery and further considers the simultaneous impacts of gender and self-construal on consumers’ subsequent indulgent consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect on brand name recall in advertisements with varying levels of female sexual objectification content among young millennials and the effect of distraction on this recall effort. The question arises whether this group evokes those brands that appear in advertisements using different levels of objectification content.

The study uses a correlational design that includes two studies with different groups of subjects: an assessment of perceived female sexual objectification levels in a set of ads and a quasi-experimental study that used the assessed perceived levels of female objectification and brand name short-term recall scores of those ads, with and without the intervention of an attention distractor.

Results suggest that female sexual objectification content exerts a limited influence on brand name recall between participants. In addition, it is not men who remember brand names from ads using sexual objectified images, but young women.

The study had an exploratory scope and used a small non-probabilistic sample. Subjects belong to a cultural context of Western world developing economy, and thus perceived female objectification may vary between different cultural settings. Results refer to graphic advertisements, though this cohort is exposed to other audiovisual content platforms.

Several studies have addressed female objectification in advertising and media, but few focused on young Latin American audiences and its impact on the recollection of advertised brands. Brand name retention and awareness is still a relevant variable that the advertising industry takes in account as one of several predictors toward buying decisions. Even less research has been made on Latin American social and cultural contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to cover the gap from the previous literature with regard to the cognitive and the behavioural component of attitude of consumers. The literature was scant in examining the influence of the mostly used traits on the purchase behaviour and the switching behaviour of consumers. Therefore, this research paper examines the impact of different marketing strategies used by the advertisers on the components of the attitude of the consumers.

First, the perception of the consumers towards the traits was measured by the factor analysis approach. Second, the impact of the traits on the purchase behaviour of consumers was scrutinized using regression analysis, and then descriptive statistics approach was used to analyse the switching behaviour and the most important tactic used in the advertisement.

The results indicate that repeated exposure, comparison of products and sexual appeals has a significant impact on the mind of consumers which determines the influence of advertising tactics. Further, the results evaluated that information, pricing element, image of company and sexual appeal are the other important traits influencing the cognitive attitude of consumers. The consumers switch to the advertised products which indicate the behavioural change with the impact of advertisement.

This research paper is suffering from some limitations as the area of research is restrained to the urban population of three districts of Punjab only, i.e. Amritsar, Jalandhar and Ludhiana, because of which the results cannot be generalized for other areas. Due to the changing behaviour and the attitude, income level and media, the response of the consumers in the present study may not be relevant in the future period. The study was confined to the working women consumers only and does not represent the whole population.

This research paper provides an insight to the marketers. The managers can measure how by using appropriate tactics can they make their advertising more effective. In case of unfamiliar products, the attitude of consumers to accept or to avoid the product is influenced by the tactics used by the marketers. It was recommended that the marketers must use the appropriate tactics to make their products/brands more pertinent and important among the consumers.

This research paper examines the impact of TV advertisement of beauty products on the components of the attitude of the urban working women consumers. This study presents the influence of the various marketing strategies used in the advertisement to influence the purchase and the switching behaviour of consumers.

This article investigates the complaints leveled at alcohol advertisements to determine the kinds of ads that attract complaints and to what extent Ready‐to‐Drink (RTD) advertising accounts for these. The research will have relevance to all countries where RTDs have developed market share. The results show that ads for beer, spirits and especially RTDs (when Share‐of‐Complaint versus Share‐of‐Market is considered) attract the greatest number of complaints. Wine ads played a negligible role. Over.96% of alcohol ads attracting complaints used either a humorous or a sexual advertising appeal, the results emphasizing the risky nature of the humorous appeal. Rational, emotional, fear, and scarcity appeals made no impact on the findings.

Portraying sex in advertisements is a widely used technique by many marketers in their promotional programmes. Some previous research has explored the relationship between attitudes toward advertising and effectiveness of sexy advertisements. However, there are gaps in this research and the authors describe an investigation which attempts to fill these gaps.

This paper aims to shed new light on the consumer response toward sex appeal in advertising and investigates ad skepticism in a culturally diverse context.

By using the qualitative research methodology, the following study draws upon informant opinions regarding the extent of graphic nudity in print advertising is needed to avoid undesirable reactions from potential consumers and how religiosity influences their attitudes toward sexually appealing advertisements. The information was obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 22 interviewees from four groups, namely, academia, advertising practitioners, religious figures and general consumers.

The remarkable findings to emerge from the interviews relate to the following: the role of religiosity vis-à-vis nudity and the “lowering of the gaze” concept in Islam, the objectification and stereotypical portrayals of women, the irrational depiction of sexuality and intimacy and factors that lead to contextual interpretation.

The result provides further evidence that skepticism does not only exist on a cognitive basis but also on an emotional level as a response to the exaggeration, unrealistic and irritating claims made in some adverts.

This study suggests that advertisers should advance their cultural comprehension by taking into account the moral and social differences.

This has been the first study to investigate the skepticism toward sex appeal in advertising and integrate both cognitive and affective context of skepticism.

Sex appeal has been widely used in most countries. However, little is known about consumers' responses to sex appeal advertising in different cultures. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of sex appeal on ad and brand evaluation among Australian, Chinese and US consumers.

The paper adopted a three (Australia, China and the USA) × two (male or female model) × two (low or high level of sex appeal) between‐group factorial design.

Australian, Chinese and US consumers have significantly different attitudes when exposed to the same ad. However, consumer buying intentions towards the advertised brand are not significantly different. Despite the general assumption that Chinese consumers might react least favourably to sex appeal ads, this paper finds that they hold similar attitudes towards sex appeal ads as US consumers and even more favourable attitudes than Australian consumers. Product involvement is found to be a significant covariate.

The sample includes young consumers, who may be more tolerant to sex appeal advertising than older generations in China. A similar situation may exist in Australia and the USA.

Understanding how consumers in different cultures respond to different advertising appeal strategies is important for international advertisers.

This is the first reported empirical study that compares Chinese consumers' responses to sex appeal advertising with those in Western countries. Findings add to the understanding of the standardisation‐localisation debate.